One Fort In The Grave - with Keith Fort

YOU can be sure of one thing -- we'll be hearing a lot more about saving the pound and about Britain's entry into the European monetary system in the months and years ahead.

Why? Because Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith has said it is time his party turned to other matters (as if they will) and because Tony Blair has signalled that, in the new world order of things, it is time for Britain to take a new look at joining the euro (when economic conditions are right, of course).

In other words, get ready for the big debate.

To my mind there have always been two issues here. One is the economic argument as to whether it would be better for the country to join; whether we should take a lead and be at the centre of Europe.

The other manifested itself in jingoism -- a misplaced patriotism concerning the preservation of the British currency as if it represented all that's best about British independence and sovereignty.

This last was an argument that totally failed to impress me. During the last election you had William Hague standing on his soapbox, holding up a £1 coin as if it symbolised all that is British. He might as well have been holding up a pizza or an MG badge for none of them has much to do with Britain's heritage.

And on top of that, among the great pile of recycled forest that arrives through our letterboxes each day, we all received a leaflet from him with the headline: "Save the Pound."

Well, I had some old news for him just as I have for his successor, Ian Duncan-Smith, if he is unwise enough to holler the same war cry.

I did save The Pound. Not this 100p mock-gold disc that masquerades as a pound today. My pound was in the form of a note. Green with watermarks and a picture of Britannia.

It promised to pay the bearer the sum of twenty shillings. One hundred pence in new Monopoly money, not the 240 old pence it used to be worth.

I didn't just save the pound. I saved the lovely old red-brown ten shilling note (now reduced to a thin, metal, seven-sided travesty of its worth). I even saved a score of those amazing copper discs -- real pennies, halfpennies and, would you believe, farthings. I also saved shillings, florins (two-shilling pieces, many early versions of which were solid silver), half-crowns, sixpences and silver threepenny bits. Bobs, tanners, half-dollars and threepenny dodgers to me and my old mates.

I realise that this is all a foreign language to anyone born in the last three decades (yes, it is just 30 years since decimalisation was introduced) but to my generation that was the REAL British currency when we really did have something different, something worth saving. We tried. And we lost.

Call us over the hill, old-fashioned, past our sell-by date if you want. We were the schoolkids who wrestled with monetary sums that would blow the minds of today's 10-year-olds.

Try taking eighteen pounds, nineteen shillings and tenpence halfpenny from twentyone pounds, seventeen shillings and ninepence three farthings. Very few under 35 will even know what I'm talking about.

But we grew up to love and value our coinage. We lived in an era when we really did have a currency worth saving. It was distinctive, unique and in those days, it looked and felt like it was worth something.

Want the proof? Some of it is now traded only in the form of jewellery. I'm talking about gold guineas and half guineas, of course. Some of us even save a few of those.

It all helped to mark out Britain as somewhere uniquely different in the world. Just think what a fascinating experience tangling with our archaic monetary system would be today for visitors to our shores.

What have they got instead? It doesn't really matter whether you call them pounds or dollars or kroner. Pennies or cents, francs or pesetas. Or even euros for that matter. Soon we won't be dealing in marks or francs or pesetas when we go abroad. Just pounds and euros. There's really no difference.

What William Hague failed to realise was that he was 30 years too late. I and others lost the pound already back in 1971 when we watched in horror as our real British currency was "phased out" for . . . a European decimal system! The plan was already in place.