Piles of money…

On the polished oak surface of our hall table sits a lone penny. It’s right at the back by the almost redundant landline telephone, just next to the unused letter rack where we keep the takeaway menus as nobody seems to send letters these days. It’s been there for ages. I’m not sure how long; but I’m not talking weeks or months - I’m talking for as long as I can remember. I don’t know how or why it got there, but there it sits doing nothing, only moved and shuffled from here to there when we feel the need to dust. A lone penny just sitting doing nothing, a single penny without much value at all - perhaps that’s why it’s there.

It’s not alone. In the kitchen at the side window - the one that has no view other than a brick wall - right in the corner of the window frame, sits a pile of coins. Like the penny it’s been there for ages, years at least, an unattended pile of coins – a small stack of tuppences, pennies and a single pound. It must belong to one of us. But there it stays, almost without ownership, forgotten in the corner by the glass.

Upstairs in the bedroom there’s a dish that is full of small loose coins gathering dust. Some of the coins are American, others Indian, but within the global mix are perfectly pocketable UK coins - all they need is sorting.

There are loose coins at the bottom of ALL of my wife’s bags. Not that I’ve looked. I just know.

My car has an ashtray full of copper.

I find pennies and five pences, tens and twenties at the back of drawers all the time. I’ve no idea how they get there. Maybe they roll into them on their own.

There’s even a small elastic-banded bundle of nine old pound notes in the draws at the top of the third floor landing.  They lie forgotten (far too late to change at the bank) a remnant from past times - just overlooked for some unremembered reason.

 

I wonder if I were to search all the nooks and crannies, each drawer, every pot and dish, the backs and sides of sofas and chairs, just how much lost and forgotten cash would I find in our house – three, five, ten, twenty or more pounds?

Lost, orphaned coinage - some almost too small or worthless to be noticed, others made invisible by familiarity.

The UK has a population of around 61 million people. Since the average number of people living in a household is 2.36, the number of households is therefore approximately 26 million. If each house and flat and mansion has just a single lost or unattended penny inside it somewhere that’s £260,000. If, like me, it runs into a pound or a few it’s £26 million minimum! Money that could be doing something useful and not simply gathering dust.

It makes you think doesn’t it?