Plastic banknotes that can survive a spin in the washing machine are to be brought into circulation by the Bank of England in 2016.
The Bank argues that the polymer notes stay cleaner and are more secure than cotton paper notes, which have been used for more than 100 years.
The £5 note featuring Sir Winston Churchill will be the first plastic banknote.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25427663
I think I still have some old £1 notes kicking around the house somewhere. I'm suprised the £5 hasn't been phased out in favour of a coin. Yes, I know there have been a couple of commemorative ones issued, but not generally used in everyday transactions.
|
>> I'm suprised the £5 hasn't been phased out in favour of a coin.
>>
And thank God for that. I have to carry a float of change with me and pound coins and coppers are bad enough, thank you. The last thing I need is yet another pocket shredder to lump round.
|
|
I prefer plastic banknotes, they should have been introduced in the UK decades ago.
|
|
The only thing that concerns me about banknotes is that whatever happens in my life I never seem to have enough.
|
I should have popped in last week - I've got a few Mandela commemorative notes for sale.
Pristine condition.
If I want more, the bank has several.
R100 notes - yours for only £10 each.
|
As someone said to me in America the other week, if you've got a pocket stuffed full of American coins you still don't have much money. All their coins are small denominations.
I like notes, they don't weigh you down but they do tend to be rubbish for parking meters.
|
Don't they have note readers in some car parks Humph? The ones at the self-service checkout in the nearest big, cough, Tesco to us work astonishingly well, sucking in tatty old fivers and spitting out the correct change.
I think they have note readers in the Heathrow multi-storeys too.
Meters are a bit of a lottery though. The best ones are the ones that take cards. The ones that expect deaf old geezers to pay by mobile phone from the clamour of a London street are just a sadistic invention by evil council geek daleks, bad cess to the carphounds. Only a dalek could make one of those work.
|
Agree with you on the phone-in meters. I usually end up screaming at the thing. The note reader things are as bad. Like Arkwright's till !
;-)
|
|
The coin meters aren't much better, as you watch your only couple of twenty Ps drop through unrecognised. A few years before I departed Lunnon the traditional public loos were being replaced by those fancy things with the automatic doors. Standing there cross legged in agony while the machine gleefully spat your coin back at you was enough to drive even a saint to murder.
|
|
You pay for parking down there?
|
>> You pay for parking down there?
>>
Pembs CC are no different to any other Local Authority in yellow lining every road they can and shepherding the motorist into their own coin meter car parks.....and then whining in the local rag about the town centre dying because everyone seems to favour the outlying retail parks.
|
>> >> You pay for parking down there?
>> >>
>>
>> Pembs CC are no different to any other Local Authority in yellow lining every road
>> they can and shepherding the motorist into their own coin meter car parks.....and then whining
>> in the local rag about the town centre dying because everyone seems to favour the
>> outlying retail parks.
Blimey, you have retail parks in Sir Benfro?
|
>>The coin meters aren't much better
>>
Many do not like the new steel coins and others need £1 coins to be wetted else they spit em out.
|
>> public loos were being replaced by those fancy things with the automatic doors. Standing there cross legged in agony while the machine gleefully spat your coin back at you was enough to drive even a saint to murder.
Heh heh... and they cost 40p I think, eight bob just for a slash!
I believe between clients they hose themselves down internally with disinfected water. They are certainly more sanitary than old-style street urinals, let alone the fragrant continental equivalents matched only by the bogs in cider pubs in this country, but one can't help wondering whether it's worth the palaver, the cost and the reduction in capacity. You wouldn't want that internal hosedown facility to operate when you were trapped inside, I sometimes thought.
Might be worth it though caught short with Montezuma's revenge far from home, a lot better for those purposes than an old-style filthy public bog with inadequate partitions and some sort of pervert in the next cubicle.
Radical curtailment of privacy is a terrible thing for a gently-raised boy. Were it not for baptisms of fire at school, in prison or in the armed forces we would all be wimps.
|
A vicar once wrote in to the Terry Wogan show to describe how he and his wife had been on holiday in Florence. They had at a desperate moment, only one € coin between them and both wanted to use an autoloo.
Their plan unfolded that Mrs Vicar would use it first and then the Revd would nip in after her before the door slid shut.
Huge mistake apparently as the door closed, the lights went off and the cubicle began to disinfect itself with the vicar inside...
Well, it got worse as apparently somewhat blinded by the disinfectant, soaked to the skin, still desperate for the loo and trapped in pitch darkness he couldn't find a way of opening the door.
Mrs Vicar became concerned after a while but for quite some time, not being aware of her husband's predicament, was outside preventing anyone else from inserting a coin in the slot to open the door.
I clearly remember Wogan reading this out on the radio while I was driving and I damn nearly wet myself laughing at the time.
Last edited by: Runfer D'Hills on Wed 18 Dec 13 at 19:04
|
|
Singapore uses polymer notes with the same sort of transparent window as is proposed for ours. I have a few well-travelled ones at home and they do seem to have worn better than other countries' textile-paper equivalents. I haven't tried washing or ironing one, though. They're supposed to be good to 120°C.
|
|
Recalling security guys delivering cash boxes with "Bank notes will be dyed and unusable " type warnings displayed, I wonder what the new anti theft tactic will be.
|
I regularly park outside some public loos while waiting to meet my daughter on the college bus, so I have observed people's habits over several years.
Many work along the doors, rejecting each on in turn, then go back to select the least-disgusting. A surprising number of young men don't bother shutting the door.
Recently the loos have been closed by the council, so after working along and finding each door locked, most just drift away. But quite a few express their protest by peeing against the door.
I observe a trend in people becoming less inhibited about urinating in public. I even did it myself the other evening. It was a quiet road, dark and late at night. I was in a layby on the nearside, and then a car passed. There didn't seem much point in stopping - no one could see very much.
|
Politzei here have been having a purge on pavement pee-ers. But the city council have closed most of the public bogs. A lot of city centre ones were a haven for cottagers and snappers.
They were also good flops for the tramps of the 60s and 70s. You don't seem to see proper tramps any more.
I had a little bladder misery last week when I was driving round doing jobs. Hot-footed it to Asda and just made it in time. Rewarded meself with a big mac on the way out !
Out on the open road, I used to park in a quiet layby, point the front of the motor out slightly towards the road, open the passenger door and use a 5 litre plastic oil container.
Not with customers on board, though
Ted
|
|
Impressed that you can hold it till you have 5l... I was using a 2l milk bottle in my tent at a boozy blues weekend and could barely half fill it with re-processed cider. :-)
|
HaHa a 5 litre bladder ? That'd be something ! Didn't fill it all in one go of course.
Needed the larger opening...guess the smaller one on the 2 litre bottle was ok for you then ?
Ted
|
|
I was peeing in it, not mounting it!! :-)
|
>> a 5 litre bladder ? That'd be something !
It would be nothing to the Irish hero Finn Mac Cool as depicted in Flann O'Brien's 'At Swim-Two-Birds'... From memory, just to be one of Finn's warriors a man had to be quite burly:
'... ten thousand rams he must sequester with wisdom about his person, the half about his armpits and the half about his trews, without offence to the men of Erin...' He also had to carry 'twenty head of cattle to the seat of his hempen drawers'.
A gallon is nothing to the bladders of geezers like that.
|
Impressed that you can hold it till you have 5l...
I'm even more impressed that he can hang it out of the passenger door.
|
>> Impressed that you can hold it till you have 5l...
>>
>> I'm even more impressed that he can hang it out of the passenger door.
>>
If you've got it..flaunt it !
Sadly.........
Ted
|
>>no one could see very much.
Don't worry, apparently women say it doesn't matter.
|
Young and drunk, one didn't care too much. Women in those days if caught short could hide under a parked lorry, but most of them are too close to the ground these days.
It isn't very civilized to pee on the pavement or in a doorway. Some doorways in Soho for example used to get very nasty indeed. In recent years when caught short by certain sorts of beer, I have peed in the gutter between parked cars (not on them), hoping any passing officious copper would take me for a bona fide traveller... If you find a drain it's even better.
No one gives a damn even in broad daylight.
|
"Women in those days if caught short could hide under a parked lorry, but most of them are too close to the ground these days."
A dreadful slur on our willowy women-hood! ;-)
|
He's got no idea Roger!
We just reverse in behind the unit wheels and bobs your uncle;)
There is a kill to it though...we who are good at it manage to park that space just over a drain grid!
Pat
|
Less of the 'no idea' business Pat... I would remind you that not all women get to park their own private personal artics in the ideal place for a semi-public pee.
The person I'm thinking of was before 1960 a West End and Chelsea character, a hard-drinking bohemian and sometime ballet dancer... ten years older than me, part of that slightly alarming post-war lot. One late drunken night in the Fulham Road she vanished under a lorry, disappearing completely. A telltale trickle seeped out though.
Been trying to remember her name. Am I getting Alzheimer's?
|
Not likely Lud:)
I remember sitting on Wisbech docks one day from 6am waiting to unload a grain boat, but it was torrential rain and they refused to open the hatches and risk getting it wet.
There was six of us waiting and they all gathered in my cab and we brewed copious amounts of tea.
Every now and again one of the other lads would jump out and water the wheelnuts but I sat there bursting.
Eventually I had to ask the question 'Where can I go?'
After much discussion they decided it would be best if I climbed into the back of my empty bulker (tipper) trailer and they all promised to stay in my cab.
The floor was very wet and slippery, and just as I was in full flow right up the front of the trailer I heard a dull 'thud, thud, thud' of the donkey engine...
Yes, I was rising at a great rate of knots and with trousers around my ankles was slipping all the way down the deepening slope of the wet floor of the trailer to the back, where I arrived in a dishevelled heap. Five blokes thought it was hilarious, and that was the day I learned to laugh with them:)
Pat
|
Very robust of them and you...
In a Hercules once, a slow aircraft, during a flight longer than anticipated owing to strong contrary winds, the men could use the crew's fold-down urinal but the only woman, a cigar chomping agency hack permanently based in Algiers, couldn't. In the end she had to use the handbasin crouching under the curve of the aircraft's fuselage... that was one annoyed stogie-chewing toughie, no kidding... More than your life was worth to address her for several hours afterwards.
|
|
Anyone who feels the need during a cycle race will slip to the back of the bunch, pull the leg of their shorts up and empty on the move. One has to take into account wind direction of course, and riders on the old amateur Tour of Britain stage race had to be reminded that such needs were to be dealt with out on the isolated country roads owing to the organisers receiving complaints from the public.
|
Who'd have thought it, from plastic money to spending a penny ;)
Quite a few celeb athletes have had a splash and dash running the London Marathon. Paula Radcliffe for example.
youtu.be/W6I2-YP42rs
|
The electric locomotives working over Woodhead had a small ' hopper ' with a drain through the floor at groinal level just inside the door to the motor room.
I don't know if modern locos have any such facility.
Ted
|
Plastic money from 2016 - Robin O'Reliant
