31 JULY, 2021

Dear Harry,

I woke in the middle of the night with the urge to pee and that old English euphemism rattling around in what’s left of my brain: Spend a penny. As in “I need to spend a penny.”

I wonder if the phrase is still current, now that its context has been long forgotten? We used to have those pay toilets—I hope they don’t have them any more!—where you had to put a penny in the slot to gain admittance. Pennies, of course, were not today’s little things, they were ridiculously huge pieces of hardware, and weighed at least a hundred times their monetary value. A “pocketful of change” would weigh your trousers down and jangle loudly when you walked. That’s when there were, sensibly, twelve pennies to the shilling (a much smaller coin) and twenty shillings to the pound. There wasn't even a pound coin.

Now they’ve gone and spoiled everything, of course.

With love, your son, Peter