Sixpence and some shillings -- change

Although I was hoping for a camera worthy reflection from the twin office building today, it never happened.  More precisely perhaps, it never happened when I was looking.

Plenty of baskets hereabouts, most of them overflowing with yarn other essential fibre goodness but none artfully arranged.

You'd think there would be plenty of knit cables around or a nest of network and other cables (think coax, cat-whatever, parallel, and  USB) but there's a dearth of the former that I actually knit and unless I'm tearing down the network due to an outage, move or addition, the latter are a leave well enough alone sort of affair.

That said, nearly four hours after I left the office, it strikes me that I do have a cache of cables in my desk drawer @ work --  DUH!!  so maybe next time with a knit cable as a backdrop.

So we're back to change as in British currency and change.

I would have included a few  British coins that are in current circulation (because you never manage to spend it all)  but the current and pre-decimalization withdrawn coins don't travel in the same circles 'round here.

The two shilling coin is/was also known as a florin or more informally as a two bob piece. 

The photos show a George VI florin minted in 1950 and an Elizabeth II florin  minted in 1961.  The change here, of course, is not just the coinage but the change in monarchs.

The photos also include a sixpence  (jolly, jolly sixpence) minted in the year of my birth.  The sixpence comes with a bit of family history/humour.

So the family humour.  At a certain point, my disinclination to marry had various factions of the family concerned and speculating as to the cause. 

One of my spinster cousins would occasionally press the issue with me and I'd reply to her that I couldn't possibly marry as I'd not sixpence  (as in sixpence to put in my shoe for luck).

 This became my stock reply until one year cousin Bess presented me with this sixpence and a long lost note suggested that neither the sixpence nor I were getting any younger. 

It and my maternal grandmother's locket were about the only traditional elements of my Vista courthouse wedding ceremony.