The ten bob note

Time was when I felt rich if I had a ten bob note in my pocket.  Back in those days the things that could be done or bought for ten shillings were legion.  That was all before 1970 because that was the year in which the ten bob note was withdrawn following the issue of the 50p coin.  But what times we had with all that money!  As a teenager, I could take my girlfriend into town on the bus, go to the pictures, have a coffee and catch the bus back home and still have change.  Later, after I had passed my driving test, I could buy four gallons of petrol and get change.  To think that a postage stamp now costs 50p.  Ten bob to post a letter!

I'm laughed at when I tell youngsters - and that includes 40-year-olds - that my take-home pay when I started work was £28 - a month.  I dreamed of the day when I would get £30 clear; then I would be rich.

Nowadays my daily paper costs £1.20 Monday to Friday, £2 Saturday.  That's more than I was earning when I started work.  Of course, this is simply the result of inflation, but it makes me shake my head in amazement when I think that my present car, which I bought second-hand, cost me more than three times what I paid for my house.

I can remember when a daily paper cost sixpence.  That's sixpence in old money - or tuppence ha'penny in the new-fangled coinage, if we still had ha'pennies.  Admittedly, that was about 60 years ago.  I wonder what they will cost 60 years from now.

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We saw Brockley church yesterday.  Its chief claim to fame is the pirate's grave in the churchyard.  Quite how a pirate came to be buried there is something I have never discovered but his grave is there.  He was buried the other way round from everybody else.  The headstone is still legible.

I've just found out: "reputedly the grave of a sick, but penitent, pirate who spent his last days in Brockley being cared for by the vicar".