Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

Twelfth Day 

We've now had the traditional Twelfth Night of Christmas - or whatever religious feast or pagan festival you actually celebrated. See our post on December 19th for all that stuff. So today is the twelfth day - depending when you start the count, of course. And there's that song, too, which maybe had special hidden meanings!

The twelfth day is supposedly when the three Magi, or wise men, or astrologers, or kings (if they really did exist at all) arrived to see the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. It's also the time when more heathen celebrations took place. See what we said last year about that.

I'm quite sad to be taking down the decorations and cards, they cheer the whole place up, but we can't postpone it much longer or it'll be the thirteenth day and bad luck, or so they say ...

Alice has spent some time today revising her Annual Budget, based on last year's bills. Sounds a rather boring activity to me, but she seems to really enjoy compiling her system for keeping In the Black. She even uses Excel to keep track. I've protested that she's about to splash out an awful lot of £££ on a new super-fast computer, just so she can edit video! Pretensions of fame?

But this will be a deduction from her "Big Money" savings, not the monthly "Little Money", she says.

Little Money? Actually old duodecimal coins.

Pound and ten shilling notes

I even quoted the famous Micawber saying from Dickens:  
    Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.

It's especially pertinent as Alice is old enough to remember the pounds, shillings and pence which didn't get replaced by decimal until 1971. But to no avail.

Instead she got sentimental about the little Farthing coins, worth a quarter of an old penny, one forty-eighth of an old shilling, and 1/960 of a pound. That's roughly 0.1042 new pence. It used to buy a single "chew" in a sweetie shop.

This image is enlarged, it was only 20mm in diameter.
It is pretty though, isn't it?

These attractive coins went out of circulation in 1961. Alice had a collection of them when she was a child, and never forgave her mother for throwing them away! If only she'd known you can sell them on eBay, we might be rich.

Enough procrastination: stop blogging and finish taking down the decorations. Then supper.