OK, so just how hard can it be?  I have a 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, and a £1 coin.  Why oh why, after nearly three months of looking, can I not find a 50p?

Now some of you will by now understand exactly what I mean, and will probably be nodding in appreciation of my plight.  However, if you have no idea what I am talking about then perhaps I should explain before we go any further.  The Royal Mint, which for those of you whom are unfamiliar with British money, is the agency appointed by the British Government which is tasked with making our coins.  In actual fact they make coins for many countries, and some medals too, but for the purposes of today it’s the coins that matter.  In addition to the millions of ordinary coins that they produce each year, The Royal Mint also occasionally make some special editions of the coins that we Brits use in everyday life.  Not for any special reason, it’s just a bit of British tradition that has been kept up over the decades, and I personally think it’s a harmless bit of fun that works quite well.  The Americans would call it “quaint”, which is fine because I happen to think that Americans using the word “quaint” is quite quaint.  So all in all, the system of “quaint” seems to work pretty well too.

Anyway, back to the coins.  These special edition coins are often released to the market, aimed purely at collectors.  Some of the coins are historic, some are  designed to commemorate special events, some are presented in frames, some in shiny boxes, but all of them are invariably shipped all over the world at exorbitant cost yet they are never actually intended to be used as coins in the traditional fashion.

Frankly this is something which I don’t really understand, because surely the whole point of a coin is that it represents a monetary value, and that you swap it for something that you need.  If you can’t spend it, then what’s the point of it?  It just becomes and object without a purpose.  It’s a bit like people who collect cars but never drive them – I don’t understand that either.  This time though, the Royal Mint have done something a bit different; they’ve released a series of coins which were not specifically aimed at the collector’s market, and so they’ve dispensed with the frames and the shiny boxes, and just released the coins into general circulation for people to find.  Not all of the coins in production at the moment bear the new design, and so occasionally you’ll get given a handful of change in a shop, and you’ll find something which stands out as being a bit different.  The series of coins in question have been very cleverly designed because they all have part of a picture on them, so that when you fit them together into a certain pattern like a jigsaw puzzle (another quaint British invention!) they make they shape of a shield bearing a coat of arms.

Now despite being simple and ultimately pointless, I think that this is quite a clever idea and it seems to solve the issue of the pointless collector sets which I have just berated.  Those people who like to collect coins can do so, arrange them neatly into a very shiny box, and then gaze at them adoringly as the coins sit in their house gathering dust.  Meanwhile, those of us who like to spend money can continue to do so because even the special edition coins work perfectly well as standard monetary instruments.  However the point is that the same objects fulfil both requirements, thus saving on production costs and generally pleasing everyone in the process.

Sadly there is a catch, and I am a tad ashamed to admit that I think I’ve been suckered by it.  As you have probably guessed by now, I am certainly not the sort of person who would ever buy a complete set of coins because I simply don’t see the point.  However, given that these coins are in general circulation, I feel strangely compelled to seek out each one in the set.  Please don’t ask me why because I don’t really know; I have no particular desire to keep them once I’ve got them, and I don’t need to construct the shield to make my life complete because I can perfectly easily see a picture of it on the web.  But nevertheless completing the set somehow feels like what I ought to do.   Being an engineer I am also a creature of habit.  I like structure, procedure, order, logic, routine, and in the words of James May “I like things to be just so”.

Therefore when I come home from work in the evenings I will invariably empty my trouser pockets onto the desk, make myself a cup of tea, and then sit down to make a deliberate point of doing precisely nothing for five or ten minutes.  Except now I find myself emptying my pockets and then taking a cursory glance to see whether any of the coins from my pocket are from the set.  Over the months this has resulted in a small handful of the new ones, and I’ve now got all of them except for the 50p.  And this, quite frankly, is irritating me.  The shield is incomplete, there is no structure, no sense of order, and worst of all it means that I have not completed what I’ve (albeit unintentionally) set out to do.  And that’s just not good enough!  Of course, the logical side of my character tells me to give up on the whole thing and just spend them, but I somehow can’t bring myself to do it.  It just feels wrong, and so the quest continues.  The whole thing is starting to get ridiculous, because as a result of owning duplicates of some of the set, I now have £4.73 sitting on my shelf which is doing absolutely nothing.  I could have spent that on….. well…. I don’t know what actually.  But the point is that it’s a waste!  I just want to find the missing coin so that I can move on and have done with the whole sorry affair, but despite my best efforts it continues to elude me.

So please, when you finish reading this, reach in to your pocket and take a look at the contents.  If you’ve got an odd-looking 50p with the tip of a shield on it, could you please consider sending it to me to put me out of my misery?  Because then I’ll be able to get on with spending money again; you know – like a normal person.