Hell hath no fury...

...like a woman who has her currency fucked with.

There is nothing like rage to take you out of yourself.

And I am quite speechless with rage at the abysmal fucking hideousness of the new designs for Britain's coins.

I love British coins with all the passion of a sentimentalist. I love all the different designs on them and their symbolisms, which I remember my Dad teaching me when I was very little. I've barely used British currency for a year and a half, but I remember them like friends: the portcullis on the penny, the ostrich feather fleur-de-lys on the two pence piece for the Prince of Wales, the Scottish thistle on the five, the English lion on the ten, the tudor rose on the twenty pence piece (my favourite), Britannia on the fifty. I love that we have coppers and silvers and fat golden pounds. I love that we have heptagons. I love all the different pound coins - roses and oaks for England, dragons and leeks for Wales, and so on.

I short, I have always - and I acknowledge some bias here - thought British money was some of the most beautiful in all the world, in an understated, classical, very British sort of way.

Whereas the new designs are frankly aesthetically offensive - agh they are so horrible! - and symbolically impoverished, sharing as they do only one design between them. The words "contemporary treatment" are by themselves doing quite dangerous things to my levels of rage, which are volcanic. Actually they're just tacky... oh look, if you lay them out in this remarkably unpleasing way you get a picture... gosh, how astoundingly juvenile and unoriginal.

Silly, stubborn child that I am, I actually find it quite deeply painful that I will have to use these monstrosities when I return, and that little ones will grow up thinking that this is what naturally goes on the back of the Queen's head. Every single time I look at one, I know it will make my day a bit worse.

I do not believe this is mere Luddism - I really like some of the special issue coins. And I do realise that there are many more important things to get angry about (and I do), but gaaaaaaah..... Why would anyone deliberately increase the sum total of ugliness in the world when they might make it lovelier instead, just for the sake of doing something new and "modern", or for any other pathetically pointless non-reason?

The RAGE. If there were justice in this world, things would be breaking into flames at my mere glance right now. (Which I think I would rather enjoy...)

(I have just realised that this was news a couple of weeks ago, so I am probably late on the rage bandwagon. Let's all go and shoot burning arrows at the Royal Mint.)