Can you humor me for a moment please?
Grab your wallet, purse, handbag, coin purse-- whatever it is you carry daily to get you through the day when you're out and about.
Open it.
You're not opening it. You never even got out of your chair... come on....
Look over the amount of money you're carrying with you today.
Exchange all of those bills into coins.
Now you're ready to come to England.
One of the things an American has to get used to here, is the need to carry cash. Very few places will accept cheques-- and that's usually only local places. So, forget driving to Nottinghamshire with that slim, hardly-takes-up-any-space cheque book, because the cashier will look at you as if you were daft for even bringing it.
I have a debit and a credit card, but they're not always accepted. The U.K. has nearly completed the switch to credit cards with chips in them (mine don't have them), so even carrying a card is sometimes pointless.
So, one must carry cold hard cash.
Correction:
Cold,
heavy cash.
In a country as old as England, you'd expect that the kinks would be worked out in most matters. But for some reason, no one has seemed to notice-- in all of these years after the end of Roman rule -- that the currency here is
heavy. Weigh-your-right-shoulder-down-so-you-look-like-Quasimodo heavy.
There are SIX coins (1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p) before you even get to a pound-- and that's a coin as well. Then there is a TWO-pound coin. So in total, there are EIGHT coins before you ever get to a paper bill, and that's a "fiver"or a five pound
note.
Next is a ten pound note, and following that is the £20, £50, and the ever-elusive £100 (never had the need to carry one of those. If I were to drop it, there goes approximately $200.00 in one clumsy move-- kind of like Las Vegas).
To really throw a monkey into the cake, most shops prefer you to pay with £20 pound notes or less (and smaller shops request smaller currency).
So if you were traveling, and knew you'd be paying for lodging, meals, train fare and or cabs-- you would be carrying a suitcase of £10 notes and a rolling cart of £1 coins.
A couple of days ago, after carrying a sleeping baby to her room with all of the grace I could muster in a coat clanging against every door jamb, I decided I needed to get the money out of the pockets.
That pile of coins at the top of this post was in my jacket pockets.
Even some U.S. coins hitched a ride.Yes, I could've exchanged most of it for notes-- save your eyes trying to calculate it.
But I prefer to carry as little paper money as possible. You see, I still haven't gotten past the "monopoly money" stage. I have a little blue bill and a bigger orange bill and I'll hand them over to any pimply-faced teenager behind a counter without any hesitation.
"£10 for 3 sandwiches? Great, and here's a cute little blue note (£5) for you to add three tiny drinks on there too please".
$30.00.
THIRTY DOLLARS for a skimpy lunch for three kids?! No way, I'd walk 20 miles home and make them a peanut butter sandwich before I paid $30.00 for six slices of white bread with a little butter slathered on it (and a few shaved slices of meat) and a drink.
Never mind. It's fun, it's exciting. It's culture. And I need some of that.
I didn't need the hunched shoulder.
Here's a close up to give you an idea of the size and thickness of the coins here.
