I'd bet a 10 bob note to a tanner that not many readers have ever handled a half-crown. Come to that, I bet you can't instantly divide a pound by three, or six, or eight, or 960 for that matter.
I can, because I was born into the wacky, wonderful world of LSD. No, not the mind-bending substance, but pounds, shillings and pence. (Livres, shillings and denarii, since you ask).
A livre is Norman-French for a pound, and a denarius is a low-value Roman coin, that's why. The current mini-furore over the introduction of the euro and the end of civilisation as we know it, gives me a sardonic chuckle.
For when Britain finally gets over its fit of xenophobic vapours and adopts the common currency, it will just be a matter of swapping an L with a couple of strokes through it, for an E with a couple of strokes through it. Both the L and the E contain a hundred units. Converting will be a doddle. A piece of cake.
Back in February 1971, when men were men and Gordon Brown was little more than a wee bairn, we had a proper change of currency. A thorough, full-blown, revolutionary change.
We kept the pound, granted. But instead of dividing it by wonderful combinations of fractions, many of them with silly names, we went over to the dull, dumbed-down system of 10s, which is what decimalisation means.
Now the thing about the number 10, is that you can only divide it by five and two. (And one and ten, if you want to be pedantic.) It's an inflexible, unimaginative, lazy way of counting.
The old currency was based not on 10, but on 20. And indeed on pretty much any number you care to name, except seven and nine. They were tricky.
Here's how it worked. The pound consisted of 20 shillings, each of which contained 12 pennies. Any sum over a pound had to be expressed in those three components. Thus £2.50 was written as £2 10s 0d.
The coinage was designed with fractions in mind, rather than decimal points. The biggest pre-decimal coin was a half-crown, worth 2s 6d.There were therefore eight of them to a pound. The shilling, called a bob, was worth one-twentieth of a pound, or 12 pennies.
The sixpence, or tanner, was half a shilling. The threepenny (pronounced thrupny) bit was a quarter of a shilling - and was also, incidentally, a wonderful chubby little 12-sided coin.
Then there was the clunky old penny. Twelve of them to a shilling, and therefore 240 to a pound. Mind you, if you had 240 of them, you risked a mild hernia, for they were wondrously large and heavy. It was a respectable coin, the penny, which is why we never called it a pee.
As a tiny extra complication, there was the halfpenny (pronounced haypny) and the farthing, which was half a haypny or quarter of a penny. This last was phased out in the late 1950s, as I am sorry to admit, I can remember.
There were 480 haypnies, and therefore 960 farthings, to the pound. Two more units, and then I'll stop.
There was a two-shilling piece, sometimes called a florin. As you will by now have gathered, 2s is one-tenth of a pound or, as we now say, 10p. It was introduced in 1849, as part of a planned decimalisation which got put off until 1971.
And then there was the guinea, which ceased to circulate in tangible form when men still wore top hats, but which remained as an accounting unit right up to the 1960s. It was worth a pound and a shilling, or £1 1s 0d. Or, if you insist, £1.05.
So, as you will have gathered, it was all dead simple. We didn't have calculators then, but we didn't need them. Our supposedly complex system of money meant that we had to be good at sums.
Children and dotards could work out 2s 6d x 7 = 17s 6d, in a flash. If they wanted to divide a pound three ways they knew instantly that each third would amount to 6s 8d.
Try doing that with a decimal quid. The fact that we are no longer much good with numbers has a great deal to do with decimalisation, in my submission. We no longer need mental arithmetic, for units of 10 and 100 are supposed to be user-friendly.
Why then, when you hand over a pound for something costing, say, 85p, do shop assistants invariably reach for a calculator to work out the change? Why, when their electronic tills breaks down, are they reduced to a helpless dither?
Incidentally, the purchasing power of a pound in 1971 was £8.61 in today's terms. Damn it, that's £8 12s 2d, in real money!
