Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...

This post was published more than 14 years ago

I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have, to put it mildly, mellowed.

I'm not a believer in brushing the past under the carpet. I've written some offensive rubbish on here in the past: deleting it and pretending it never happened doesn't change that. I hope that stumbling across something that's 14 years old won't offend anyone anew, because I hope that people can understand that what I thought and felt and wrote about then is probably very different to what I think and feel and write about now. It's a relic of an (albeit recent) bygone era.

So, given the age of this post, please bear in mind:

• My views may well have changed in the last 14 years. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find utterly cringeworthy today.
• This post might use words or language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate, offensive, embarrassing, or all three.
• Factual information might be outdated.
• Links might be broken, and embedded material might not appear properly.

Okay. Consider yourself duly warned. Read on...

The front-page news that pre-1992 coppers (coppers that are actually made of copper) are now worth more than their face value in scrap has apparently sparked meltdown at the Mint, with them being forced to put out a statement reminding people that it’s illegal to melt down a coin of the realm. So there’s a thing.

Perhaps bank robbery could be worth it after all – steal the coppers, melt them down, and you’ve got untraceable money worth more than the coins you started with. Not that I’m recommending bank robbery, here! You could always try selling your 2p coins on eBay, though.

But how many such coins are still in circulation? In the interests of research (and just because I was bored), I went through my penny jar, expecting to find very few pre-1992 coins. (I’m not usually this dull, it’s just that I’ve finished my most recent rotation today, so was at something of a loose end.) As it so happens, I have quite a number of these coins. A good proportion of them are older than me, let alone pre-1992. It’s interesting to think what a remarkable piece of design it takes to be in every day use by all sectors of society, and still as functional as the day they were first produced a quarter of a century later. How many other things have survived so long in everday use?

Of course, the design itself hasn’t lasted so long, which is why the 1992 cut-off exists. The copper-zinc mix was then replaced by a steel version, with a thin copper coating. So coppers aren’t really coppers anymore. And I guess that probably goes for the police force, too.

But, at the end of the day, my money is worth more than it was last week. And, under the circumstances, it’s difficult to complain about that.