Skip to main content

Granny reduced to tears over demise of LSD


A few shillings short: barmy grandmother is reduced to tears at the prospect of losing the ten-bob note

I was still a tot when the UK converted to decimal currency, so don't have a vivid memory of the propaganda campaign that was waged by the government to win people over to the new system.

This video is more than a public information film. It seems to be an excerpt from a full-scale drama in which a family lives out the trauma of 'D-Day' in 1971. (Given that many people at that time had vivid memories of the war, perhaps it wasn't the best choice of name.)

The young lad of the family knows where the future lies and his glamorous older sister is taking everything in her stride. Mum's all of a dither and looks as if she might need a man to help her out when she goes shopping with the new coins. But it's gran who's causing us the most worry. She seems prone to tears at the prospect of decimalisation and we get the impression she might take to her bed for the next month or two.

When the saucy milkman knocks to collect his weekly dues (think of Bob Grant's conductor in On The Buses), everything gets on top of her. Which is what one fears the milkman might like.

A glorious curio from a bygone era.

If anyone knows, incidentally, why some shops were allowed to continue to trade in LSD after the conversion date, please do post a comment.

Comments

  1. My own grandmother up near Edinburgh continued to refer to shillings until her death in 1994, and since a lot of the one- and two-bob coins *still were exactly that* nobody really minded.

    5p coins still said 'one shilling' on them and there were still 20 of them to the pound. 10p similar. I remember some 50p coins said ten shillings on the back too.

    So long as you didn't try to dive down to pennies it was all fine. Indeed - still is...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

Ok, so I gave ChatGPT the following scenario: "Imagine a theatrical script for a situation comedy set in a hotel in Torquay, England. The proprietor is called Basil, an eccentric man who believes the calibre of guests to be low. His wife, Sybil, is often frustrated by Basil's incompetence. They employ a Spanish waiter called Manuel, who struggles to understand English. Basil suspects that two guests, who claim to be married, may be lying." Here's what our favourite AI came up with: Scene: The hotel lobby in Torquay, England. Basil is standing behind the reception desk, looking at a piece of paper. Sybil is standing next to him, looking annoyed. Manuel is hovering nearby, trying to look busy. Basil: (to Sybil) I don't know why we get such low-calibre guests at this hotel. Look at these two - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They claim to be married, but I suspect they might be lying. Sybil: (sighing) Basil, it's not our job to judge the marital status of our guests. Just m

It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at

The race for bogus Olympic stats

Of all the dubious statistics thrown around in relation to the London Olympics, the claim that there are '47 tube journeys in central London that can easily be walked' is surely one of the most misleading. I suspect it is based on the relative proximity of one station to an adjacent one. Embankment is walking distance from Temple. Charing Cross is a stone's throw from Leicester Square. But what exactly is a 'tube journey'? As I've understood it - and I'm only going on three decades' experience of using the network - it is a journey that takes you from any one place with a tube station to another. My journey from Leicester Square might take me to Charing Cross, but it might also lead me up the line to Camden Town or down south to Morden. In fact, from any one tube station - thanks to the wonders of interconnections - there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of options available to me. Now, I don't claim to have a PhD in mathematics, but the number of p