I have a few heavy handfuls of foreign coins. Old ones, valueless as money now the Euro is king in that part of the world. I bought them by the pound on E-bay, and used them in class as tokens. I'd reward something done well by paying the student with a coin, which they could later use to 'buy' points on a test. After a year of doing this, I found many of the coins were not coming back, as the students would rather keep the coins than get the grade boost.
So.... I've got some coins laying around.
The other day, working at my jewelry bench, I kept glancing at this brass three pence slug. It was nibbling at my thoughts as I worked, until finally I incorporated it in a piece. Using a piece of silver ring shank too short to make a 'real' ring, I found a different way to use it on the coin.
Now, I have a ring built from a brass three pence coin, minted in Great Britain in 1939.
The thought going through my mind? This coin was money... and then it wasn't. One day it could be used to buy something, and the next it had more value as a chunk of brass than coin of the realm. One moment, it represented somebodies hard work and labor... and the next moment it didn't.
That is sobering thought.
3 comments:
On this theme, and in expectation of the UK finally going down the toilet, the small savings we had have been converted into dry goods and water filtration systems.
Beefed-up security for the house, and a variety of edged weapons (not illegal inside ones own home in the UK) are current works-in-progress.
We are very lucky in that where we live is well away from major towns & cities, but when things do explode the inner-city ferals will scatter to find other soft targets.
We used to take silver dollars and peen the edges over until they formed a ring, then drill out the center. You could read "in god we trust" around the inside of the ring. In retrospect the silver dollars were probably worth too much to do that to. One guy used some kind of mexican coin that seemed to be mostly copper, but was very large.
Hope you kept a casting of the nifty amanita muscaria mushrooms. It'd come in handy when you begin to mint your own coins. How much would that weigh in sterling?
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