Elle Ess Dee

>> PART 2

10.26pm local time, 24°C (75°F), heavy rain

Here he comes again … another nostalgic overdrive…

(via Imgur)

It’s not what you think. I’m not talking about the drug LSD (‘acid’).

Heaven help you people, you know when I’m being nostalgic, it’s TL;DR overdrive.

Recommended background music when reading this:—

Stars on 45: The Charts 1975–1979 on SoundCloud

The length of that medley is EXACTLY the time it takes to read his incredibly longwinded escapade of nostalgia.

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FLASHBACK TO THE ’70S

Must write about this before it all evaporates from me from old age or insanity (or both) — or something else far-out.

Just back from the local café. Three blokes at the other table beating themselves up how to split a sum of money three ways. My mind starts to roll how easily it was to do in the old days — yet how confusing it was for some to learn it.

(via c4c)

The first time I visited the UK the place was still using Old Money (“O.M.”) — the £.s.d

£ — pound (libra)

s — shilling (solidus: rhymes with “so lead us,” not “solid us”)

d — penny (denarius)

In line with my M.O., I wrote three-quarters of this post STRAIGHT FROM MEMORY. I wanted to see how far I could get right after all this time. @_@ Then I filled in the technical gaps with my old man’s and my own notes to design the charts. No outside source used — because I wanted to know how well my recall is of this stuff.

Those of you reared on £.s.d (preferably not LSD) can advise in the comments.

The lovely charts are free to reuse.

(via Wikimedia)

The whole British way of life radically changed in the Seventies.

I have so many memories of those days (good and bad, of the UK and elsewhere) that it’s hard to know just where to begin.

To make the case for an alternative future to neoliberalism, we have to change the way we tell the story of our past.

Shrinking economy
Sunset industrial base
Rising joblessness
Frequent industrial actions and picket-line confrontations
Class warfare, after class discrimination of before
Stiff competition in historical export markets
Rising damp in education
‘The Troubles’ finally spilling over to the mainland
Colonies lost, Empire dissolved, immigration gained

Plus the usual suspects—

The subcultures
The fashion
The music (“Stars on 45” certainly still ranks high on my list of the good)
The TV shows (“Crown Court,” “It’s A Knockout,” “The Val Doonican Show”)
The public personalities and personages (e.g. Mary Whitehouse)

… and all the rest of it you could read about elsewhere.

(via c4c)

Britain was the last place on Earth to still use Classical Roman money reckoning.

My first round there the place was on £.s.d. By the time a few years later when I was properly there for ‘schooling’ (and scoring with the birds), the money had already been decimalised (and decimated) — New Money (“N.M.”).

(Interestingly, Mauritius and Madagascar are the only two still on non-decimal currency, but they don’t use Roman.)

If you think using the Roman Empire system for money right into the 20th century wasn’t bizarre enough, some neurotic Victorian-era practices still persisted in 1970s Britain. For instance, Wimpy’s the hamburger chain in 1971 still didn’t allow women on their own into their restaurants past midnight. The idea was that women like that must have been prostitutes. Which was bollocks, of course.

* * *

SPONDULIX OF EMPIRE-NO-MORE

Forgotten the exact date of decimalisation now, but I do remember the name (Decimal Day) and Teddy Heath was in office, if that helps.

Everybody had (and still has) a different mental version of the O.M.

I got into ‘the proper basics’ first (next section). Very quickly I developed a shorter basic version with built-in conversion (above).

The postwar £.s.d had long been eight coins and six notes. That came down to five of each by Decimal Day, when six new coins and five new notes replaced them.

It’s easier if you just see what the O.M. looked like.

(sizes not to scale)

Farthing ¼d 1956

Halfpenny ½d 1970 – ‘hayp-nee’

Penny 1d 1966

Threepence 3d 1960 – ‘thrupp’nce’

Sixpence 6d 1966 – ‘sixp’nce’

Shilling 1/- 1963 – the ‘bob’

Florin 2/- 1967 – the ‘two bob bit’

Halfcrown 2s.6d 1961

Ten shillings 10/- note

£1 = 240d

£5 – a ‘Lady Godiva’ or ‘lady’

£10 – a ‘cockle and hen’ or ‘cockle’

(Images via Predecimal.com, rhonddalad, Leftovercurrency.com)

My life’s timeline (touch wood) straddled the old and the new.

I’m one of the last batches of pupils still required to learn the metric and the imperial together. That included the £.s.d because some of the old coins were still in use, albeit with new face values. Some of our textbooks still had O.M. examples, a useful lesson about outdatedness.

How it all meshes together

Grammar nazis will probably throw a fit from the chart. There’s no rhyme or reason to British singulars and plurals (or their verbing). Treat it as idiomatic singularising and pluralising.

TRIVIA:— The two bob bit (2 shilling piece, or florin) was known in Chinese as 盾 (‘shield,’ pronounced tùynn).

(click image for full size)

We used to learn stuff ‘in both directions.’

Both directions??? You know, like—

1 big thing is 12 smaller things <——> 12 smaller things make 1 bigger thing

Seems silly now to do the same thing twice, but when you’re on the spot the mental arithmetic really pays off sometimes.

Bidirectional learning has its benefits. We learn to see things heading towards one way, perhaps for the good, but do we know when its heading the other way, the bad? Not unless we’ve learnt it the other way and recognise it, get my drift?

They stopped making O.M. years beforehand

Nearly all of the old denominations were once actual coins. Most of the old coins and notes stopped being made in the 1960s and demonetised a year or two ahead of switchover. I gathered that the government introduced the 5p, 10p and 50p coins in the Sixties to let people get used to decimal money to ease any switchover pains.

(click image for larger size)

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COMING UP NEXT

Part 2: How the bread and honey appears to me

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DocID: B14127 (1,005 words)
Updated 15 May 2014 (link to Part 2)
Updated 11 Oct 2014 (extra link to Part 2)