The £2 coin

2 Pounds Sterling

I don’t know if there was a specific day when Mervin King (or MerKing as I will be calling him from now on) sat down in front of… whoever it is he sits down in front of, and decided that the £1 coin wasn’t quite cutting it anymore and that the answer to all of the country’s problems was the £2 coin.

I guess it is inflation, the fact that where once you might have bought a bottle of coke using just one £1 coin and now you find that would almost certainly be insufficient.

I don’t even have any £2 coins at the moment, so I’m not entirely sure how they popped into my head, but they have and now you, whoever you are, have the lucky experience of reading about it.

I can still remember a time, when France’s currency of choice was the Franc and Bergerac was as far as I’d ever travelled from home. It was a special time, an innocent time, when Santa might still have been real and birthdays were occasions of excitement rather than dread. What I am getting at here is about 10 or 15 years ago, you’d go on holiday, with the parents, and before long you’d be handed a wondrous coin by some sweet shop assistant or crepe vendor. Yes, you knew that there would no longer be pounds and pence in your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wallet, but never could you have anticipated a coin which is 2 different colours. Oh yes, this was a special thing, something to be treasured; the 10 Franc coin was unlike anything we had at home, despite being broadly similar in both size and value to a £1 coin. The 20 Franc was even more special, offering gold around the outside and as a spot in the middle, these were even rarer finds.

Then, stealing away the excitement of children everywhere at the amazing possibility of foreign currency, The Bank of England, or the Royal Mint, or the Prime Minister, or The Queen, or Santa; decided enough was enough and that we must have a new coin. The £2 was born.

I quite like the thing. I don’t really understand the pattern on the front, most coins in this country have borne some form of coat of arms on one side and a face on the other. For some reason the designer of the 2 coloured £2 instead decided to see what would happen if you cross a zebra, some sandpaper and a range of Archery goals. Apart from that though, it’s pretty useful. A single £2 coin is lighter than 2x £1 coins, generally the main reason for carrying larger denominations.

The downside is, you still come across drinks machines, parking meters and the vast majority of websites that don’t accept the bloody thing. I mean, come on guys, it’s been around for about 11 years, it’s not that hard surely?

Anyway, yeah, the £2 coin. I actually quite like them and I would like to encourage you to post me yours as soon as you can possibly find the time. I will find a very good use for them. 🙂

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I never did manage to slip MerKing in there again… shame.