Showing posts with label Thrupenny bit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thrupenny bit. Show all posts

Saturday, January 5, 2013

..finding a thrupenny bit in your Christmas pudding


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.