There's nothing worse than finding a
thrupenny bit in your Christmas pudding.
Pronunciation note. Thr- oo - penny.
Say the u like the oo in book or look.
Some people might say there's nothing
worse than Christmas pudding, other that there's nothing worse than the complete Christmas dinner. Finding a thrupenny bit in your mouth in the middle of eating that great British delicacy on Christmas day, having already consumed enough
calories for the next five days, can never be regarded as a good thing. So this is
what has happened. Mum has put a thrupenny bit in the pudding during
the mixing stage and cooked the pudding with it inside. Where did she get it from? It hasn't been legal
tender in the UK since 1971. Did she have a collection of old coins
she had kept from childhood? Probably. Did she properly sterilise
the thrupenny bit before putting it in the pudding mix? Probably
not. After being the chosen one who found the coin, it must, of course, be given back to Mum for use again next year. The thrupenny bit in question, I'm sure, had an interesting tale to tell, up
to that point in time. All the pockets and purses it had been in doesn't bear thinking about. The places where it had changed hands
are even more intriguing. Perhaps the young soon-to-be Queen Elizabeth used it
to buy a bag of boiled sweets from her local corner shop. Maybe Bobby
Moore used it to buy three penny-worth of chips after coming out of
Upton Park on a cold Saturday evening having just played a blinder against
Liverpool. However, this year, it ended up being swilled around in someone's mouth, and
next year - same thing. Tradition is a wonderful thing.
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