Jean wrote "My mother did the shopping for my housebound grandmother and had to write down the Pounds, shillings and pence equivalent of each item right up to my grandmother's death at the age of 96 in 1978, 7 years after decimalization. 89 years pre-decimalization just couldn't be pushed aside to cope with a pound changing from 240 old pence to 100 new ones."
But that was because she was 'protected' from the real world, and your mother was willing to go along with it. If she hadn't been housebound and been doing her own shopping then she would have coped with it. I was talking about apparently intelligent people who would stand at the till and do the maths to convert what showed on the cash register back to old money, carefully count it out to me in florins, ten bob notes etc, and when I counted their change back to them (in as many of the new decimal coins as I could use; evil aren't I) would mentally convert what I had given them back to £, sh and d. It's on a similar lines to my Mum, who insisted on asking for her goods at the deli counter in lbs and oz on the grounds that she couldn't understand kgs (not because she was protecting our British heritage), but was quite happy to go to France several times a year where she confidently shopped, in metric quantities, using a different language and currency as well. Jacquie To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected].
