You wouldn’t usually look to the Royal Mint or our reigning monarch for finger-on-the-pulse, zeitgeist-surfing innovations. After all, one is the UK’s oldest company and the other got his first proper job aged 73. However, last week’s unveiling of the first coins to commemorate King Charles III takes the Duchy Original oaten biscuit.
At first glance, the new coinage looks nice enough. They’re, you know, coins. Remember them? They used to jangle around in your pocket, weigh down your wallet or gather dust down the back of the sofa. You put them in parking meters and vending machines. You collected them in giant whisky bottles and tossed them into charity collection buckets. You’d flip them and call heads or tails, magically pull them from behind gullible children’s ears or put them in Christmas puddings so a relative could break a tooth. Loose change. Shrapnel. What a blast from the past. Peter Kay should do a nostalgic riff about coins in his next standup set, just after the bit about Spangles and Raleigh Choppers.
The shiny set of coins, which will enter circulation by the end of the year, “celebrate the King’s love of nature” by depicting British flora and fauna on their tail side. These range from red squirrels to dormice, puffins, salmon and capercaillie grouse. The inscription around the edge of the new £2 coin was chosen by His Maj himself, taken from his inaugural speech last September. It reads: In servitio omnium (“In the service of all”).
The biscuit-taking bit is that the coins have been redesigned with outsize numbering “to help children identify figures and learn to count”. A laudable aim but what century are these dinosaurs living in? If there are four things younger generations aren’t remotely interested in, it’s coins, royalty, Latin and grouse. Rebecca Morgan, a director at the Royal Mint, said: “The large numbers will be very appealing to children. So will the animals and everything you see on these coins. They are great conversation starters.” Are they, though? It’s all painfully out of touch with how modern kids are with money. Cash use, especially in smaller denominations, has long been in decline. Kids nowadays are contactless. They’re at the vanguard of the cashless society.
If a grandparent or godparent gives my children old-fashioned money – very generous of them, of course – my little darlings look at it slightly baffled. You might as well hand them a postal order or luncheon vouchers. At the first polite opportunity, they’ll slip me the cash and I’ll transfer funds to their payment card. I should really take a small commission. “You know Uncle Keith slipped you a paper tenner? Well, I’ve deposited £8.76 in your bank account. Stop crying, it’s a valuable life lesson.”
Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are keen on tackling the “anti-maths mindset”. Is this really the kind of thing they have in mind? If you truly wanted to encourage numeracy, you’d design a video game or mobile app. Maybe a fruit-flavoured vape.
Coins with whopping numbers are more use to tourists or, without wishing to sound ageist, older punters who have massive fonts on their mobile, which they keep in a leather wallet case and jab at impatiently while tutting. For the youth of today, there’s no loving care for tender. Mintage is strictly vintage. Pardon the puns but coins have no currency nowadays.
• Michael Hogan writes about lifestyle and entertainment, specialising in pop culture and TV
