Artifacts and memorabilia are hard to account for. What I mean is that I tend not to put much stock in sentimental objects… but then I stumble across something unexpected and all of a sudden it all becomes important to me!
Case in point Tuesday afternoon. I needed to hunt down a couple of documents and before I knew it I had one of my dad’s old boxes and it was game on.
Three things specifically caught my attention. The first was this photograph of my mother from when dad first met her. Good grief, she must have been barely 17.
Then these two medals dad won in high school. This one is for athletics – dad won the top award for “all around” track and field. Then the gold medal (below) that he was awarded for being “sportsman of the year.” I knew he had been competitive in everything from track to soccer to cricket, but I had not remembered we had the exact same achievements our senior years.
Then this collection of coins. All the English money from before decimalization (Feb 15, 1971). This is especially cool because I had just been talking with friends about the money I grew up with a few days ago. The coinage was really interesting.
Pounds, Shillings, Pence…
Instead of 100 pennies to an English pound there were 240. This is because there were twenty shillings in one pound and twelve pence in each shilling. I remember when the half-penny was in circulation (480 to a pound) and also the farthing (that’s 1/4 of a penny, or 960 to a pound.
But wait, it gets even better! There was a three-penny coin (“threepenny-bit”) that is 1/80 of a pound. Then the popular “tanner” or sixpence, 1/40 of a pound (including the rare “silver sixpence”).
Two of the shillings made a florin (24-pence) and two and a half of shillings equalled the half-crown (30-pence). And two of those added up to a crown (that’s five shillings or 1/4 of a pound.
Finally, we have ten bob (or ten shillings) and one guinea. The guinea was twenty-one shillings, or one-pound one-shilling. It was popular for pricing more expensive items (100 guineas, then, was really 105 pounds).
I was 14 when England shifted to a decimal currency. The change certainly made math a little easier, but the unique monetary system helped to define the personality of much of the commerce and I think England was in some way impoverished as a result.
So what?
The point of this post is how objects can hold meaning that we don’t necessarily grasp until after the person – or the situation – is gone. It is almost as if some of what made that person so important (in this case my dad… and my early childhood) is literally transferred into the object.
This is how something changes from object to artifact – or talisman. Maybe it is not so much human sentiment as measurable sentience? Maybe physical objects can actually hold emotional content?
Maybe. Regardless, I am glad I stumbled across them – DEREK
