Pounds, shillings and what?

Pure

Just finished, handing this back to the library today. Timothy Mo's prose is densely packed, and with the speed at which the story unfolds, the 390 pages could easily have sprawled to a less disciplined five or six hundred. Hedonistic ladyboy Snooky is recruited, press-ganged, into spying on an extremist training camp. There start the twists and turns. Underated author. Hardly prolific, over ten years since his last book. I was introduced when I picked up a remaindered Sour Sweet in the early 1980s. Mo is English, parents from Honk Kong and Yorkshire.

Fowlers End

Is a book about one of those seedy, scruff London suburbs where Dickens meets the Wild West. It's full of stuff like this “Youth is a dream, middle age a forlorn hope, and old agea nostalgia with a pervasive flavour of newly turned earth. Turn your back for five minutes and nothing can ever be the same again”. Tempered with “My mother was psychic – that is to say, she lived in a state of permanent premonition, so she was right at least half the time. If the sky became black and raindrops as big as shillings [that's about 10 mm diameter for anyone dealing in new money] started to come down and there was a rumbling overhead, she had a preminition of a thunderstorm”. A funny and sharp portrait of run down suburbia in the late fifties.

New money

We've had this newfangled decimal stuff for so long now that the term 'new money' has become meaningless, I suppose. At and after changeover, £sd and decimal were old and new money. The old stuff was absurd and I didn't miss it. There were ha'pennies and pennies. Twelve pennies to the shilling (a bob) and twenty shillings to the pound (hence my refering to £1.50 as 'thirty bob'). Twenty one shillings to the ginuea. What was that for? 50p was ten bob, and 2s6d (12.5p) was half a crown. 2s was a florin (I think) and there were things like a penny ha'penny being three ha'pence.

The bookie's odd well known to gamblers arise from this old money, and a different in countries that have always had decimal money. 11 to 8, 13 to 8, 6 to 4 and so on don't exist, and they have everything – to 10 or – to 5.

For example, place eight bob at 13 to 8 and, should your dog or horse win, the payout's a ginuea. Win thirteen shillings, stake back eight shillings, 13 + 8 = 21 shillings = a ginuea. Four bob at 6/4 wins ten bob. Easy then, absolutely painful now and forty years out of date.

Fantastic food last night

Brilliant, largely vegetarian Indian food last night. Highlights were a chilli paneer starter and a paneer with black pepper and South Indian spices main, the Tiffin Cup-winning elephant yam curry, and a mild in heat but very spicy chicken curry. Enough in the doggy bag for MM's lunch and BLISS's dinner tonight.

Lassi

I replaced the broken blender today and I've had a cumin and salt lassi and BLISS has had a sweet mango one. They were delicious. I got a glass one this time, hoping it might be a bit more robust.