That clanking and jangling coming from your pockets is probably loose change. Guess what? Like a lot of other things, loose change drives me slightly nuts. It’s just a hugely costly way to weigh the world down. We should switch at once to card or phone-based micropayments…can anything that costs less than a pound actually be worth buying anyway (e.g. tabloid newspapers?)
Until that day, we will still have to cart around fragments of cupro-nickel. The brown stuff is particularly galling, since it’s worth so little that even children won’t bend down to pick it up off the street. Banks won’t turn it into notes and it probably costs charities more in transporting change about than they gain when you drop into into their collecting tins.
Today’s invention is a way to rid ourselves of the damn stuff. Take a 20m section of flexible pipe or conduit and gradually fill it with brown change (so that each coin lies flat on the next). Then run it from the top of your roof to the ground.
This ersatz lightning conductor should cost less than £100 (using 1p’s) and be almost as effective as a high-spec, pure copper version. When the storm strikes, you will have removed a great deal of excess baggage from circulation.
