I’ve got a pocket full of pretty green

Actually I’ve got a purse full of fucking change that I can never spend myself rid of.

Now the point to this blog is that it never used to be that way and I think I know why. Up until last year I always seemed to have a couple of squids and a few pennies in my purse (along with an absence of notes) but ever since Gordon Brown changed the VAT rate from whatever it was to some arbitrary number he saw on the back of a scratchcard he bought to try and win TeamUKGB (or whatever we are called) out of this recession I have so much change that I can no longer fit it all in my purse. I’m sure you’re the same? Go look now – do you have unsightly bulges in your Louis Vuitton purses? Do you have excess change neatly stacked up in it’s correct piles on the fireplace? Or worse – in one of the over-sized empty (but not now! it’s full of fucking change) whisky bottles? And where the hell do they come from?

Anyway, the VAT rate change. Now we always used to buy something for, say, £9.99 and get a solitary penny to tuck back in to our purse or more realistically say, “keep the change”, as it was not even worth the effort of holding our hands out for. But now that price is, say, for example, £9.76 ( I know it’s not but it’s an example, ok?) and so we get 24p change. Which isn’t so bad right? Three coins, 20p and two 2p’s. So why the huge increase in how much we all have to lug about? Well, it’s in the words, “sorry luv, I don’t have any 20’s…or 2p’s…will pennies do you?”. You see the poor shopkeeper has to give out so much more change these days that they have the reverse problem and never have enough change. But I guess they can now get their own back by dishing out all those 1p’s we were too busy/rich for in the past but now need to suck down and grasp as the economy goes down the plughole.

It’s a funny old reversed world.