During my recent trip to Paris
5 x 1 Eurocent
(plus 1, almost! See below)
1 x 5 Eurocent
1 x 20 UK
2 x 5 UK
3 x 1 UK
That little lot caused me all sorts of effort! I am proudest of the one I found in the Gare
du Nord. It was located in the exact
centre of a dirty, metal encircled hole (a sort of screw receptor), and presented
two challenges: (1) to notice that there
was anything aside from dirt in the hole at all (the Eurocent was quite
dirt-encrusted), and (2) to realise that the little metal disc at the centre
was not a part of the structure but a separate object. There are loads of small metal button-type
hole structures on the floors of tube stations, and recognising that this one
was different was very difficult. I was
so proud of myself!
The other ones I collected all over Paris, in the usual
places, in gutters and crevices and near telephone boxes and cash machines and
under coffee tables and at the bottom of stairs and (surreptitiously!) from the
floor of a bakery and near a newspaper stand.
Strangely enough I never find anything in the seriously rich
areas of town. You would have thought
that rich people lose the largest coins, and that one could find Euro 2 coins
quite easily in the Rue St Honore, but sadly that is not the case.
Last weekend I finally managed to
buttonhole the owner of a shop near the Louvre who had been getting on my
nerves for simply ages. I took lots of
photos, so you can understand what I am on about. I have no objection to the shop itself, it
sells nautical antiques, quite out of my spending range, but then everything is
in that part of town except nasty little tourist gewgaws. No, what bothered me was the fact that this
shop has windows which reach to the floor, and when you stand in front of them
it is hard to tell where the shop ends and the road starts. Why is this a problem? Because in the corners of the windows there
are scattered loads of coins! Coins
which look as though they are laying in the street, ready for the taking, fair
booty for any intrepid coin collector!
But instead they are behind glass and inaccessible! This is more frustrating than I can possibly
convey to you.
Usually the shop is closed, but this time I was lucky! Just as I was glaring at the corner coins again, the owner and his mother arrived and unlocked the shop. And as quick as you could say Knife! I was on to him and complained about the coins and the irritation they caused passing coin collectors. In my horrible French. He looked at me strangely and came out to see what I was on about. ‘But these are just ordinary French coins,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to buy them?’ He clearly had misunderstood my usage of the term ‘coin collector’ and thought I was trying to buy rare coins he didn’t realised he had for sale.
As usual in such situations I invoked Unca Scrooge, and
explained that I was collecting coins by finding them, ‘Comme Unc Picsou’ (like
Unca Scrouge) in the street. Then his
face lit up and he smiled. ‘Of course’,
he exclaimed, ‘how stupid of me!’ Then
he told me that he had put the coins into the corners of his shop as a sort of
talisman, he used the word ‘superstition’ (same in French). At that I forgave him, and he seemed much
gratified. We parted the best of
friends. I was well dressed, if I had
looked scruffy he might have called an ambulance …
But that was not the end of my coin collecting adventures
that day! Whenever I have to wait for a
train in the Metro (or anywhere else for that matter) I pace up and down the
platform looking for coins. And on this
occasion I spotted one - a Eurocent in the dirt, barely visible, next to the
foot of someone sitting on one of those red seats. Normally when this happens I hover nearby,
and even sit down if there is a seat available, and wait for the stranger to
move away. Then I retrieve the coin.
But on this occasion the stranger was a homeless person
(clochard) and clearly needed luck more than I did. So after some internal moral struggle I
overcame my greed for coins, picked up the Eurocent, and gave it to the
man. ‘Look what I found at your feet,’ I
said, ‘a lucky coin! Good luck to
you!’ But the man did not appreciate the
superhuman denial and selflessness thus displayed by me. Instead he held out his hand and asked for a
Euro! Well he did not get one. That’s the last time I give away a lucky
coin! I mean, honestly, all this inner
struggle and overcoming my collector’s impulse for nothing?
