Rendering unto Caesar (2)

Some years ago I lived near a charity shop with a collecting box outside, shaped like a curved funnel. You'd put your coins through a slot in the perspex lid, and they'd roll around the funnel in ever decreasing and accelerating circles! There was more than one slot, so you could send two coins around at once!! This provided literally minutes of fun for my then girlfriend and I. This was emblematic of the intense hedonism and senseless spending that characterised our relationship, but you burn out after a while, it's inevitable. By the end we were little more than charred husks. However it did get rid of surplus coins.

I read somewhere that penny and tupp'ny coins are now worth more as scrap metal than currency. So perhaps the rag and bone man might take away the four Pringles tubes full of them which are threatening the stability of the floor in the corner of my kitchen. Of course if it's possible to gradually collect these things through purchases, then it's possible to get rid of them in the same process, by handing over Exactly The Right Money. But that's far more mentally challenging and socially awkward than it is, in a very literal sense, worth.

First of all you have to carry the shrapnel about with you, giving your trouser pockets that end-of-the-evening feel, but without the associated pleasant alcoholic haze. Then you have to work out, in your hand, on the spot, at the time, Exactly The Right Money - I'm neither good with figures nor particularly dextrous, so this takes ages. Which is all very touching when a poverty-stricken geriatric is doing it insanesbury's but can hardly be indulged by the queue to the rear of a comparatively young adult. Then, having given them Exactly The Right Money you have to hover for a moment to check they concur with your estimate, which is a real moment of discomfort, I can tell you.

Now it's not just the coppers, I can't seem to shift the silver either. Fivepences were long since impossible, but I've been passively collecting ten and twenty pees for years now. That's more Pringles tubes, the requirement for which as storage for coins outstrips my own consumption of the original contents.

Not that I'm looking for sympathy. The real victims of excessive coinage are crack and smack dealers in the West End. Beacuse their customers raise almost all their funds through begging, and because donations generally arrive in pounds and fifty pees, that's what they end up with in their pockets. Even a fairly stout Avirex jacket can be pulled out of shape by a couple of hundred quid's worth of coinage stowed in the pockets. They have to go to the local banks several times a day to change all that metal into paper.

So in future the lunch hour Lady Bountifuls and One-Day-Travelcard philanthropists upon whom the Seven Dials and district narco economy ultimately relies should make it a fiver or a tenner. Or set up a direct debit. It's the least they can do.