╥Five brandies,╙ said the bartender, ╥and three beers.╙ This was me, generous on Third Avenue. ╥And one Scotch-on-the-rocks.╙ What he did then was to tot it all up on a piece of paper. Yes, I thought; that╒s the sort of thing that happens in a dollar country. A British barman will add up the most fantastically various major round in his head; get among the decimals, and out come paper and pencil. It╒s something to do with the fact that decimal money isn╒t real; it isn╒t solid enough to visualise. Add one-and-nine to two-and-three and a powerful image of two florins forms on the retina. But cents are abstractions, computer-stuff. A quarter is different, more like real money ╤ a two-bob piece or a tosheroon. It╒s significant that Americans are able to think of it as ╥two bits╙. A bit is more genuine than a cent, and yet a bit is not supposed officially to exist.
The East Coast Malays have dollars and cents like the rest of the Federation, but they too have made a solidity out of an abstraction: twenty-five cents to them is two kupang. A thing advertised in Kuala Lumpur at 25c is to be bought for dua kupang in Kota Bharu. An ancient instinct tells people to think of a dollar, not as a piece of a hundred, but as a piece of eight. Look at the dollar sign and you will see that it symbolises the splitting of the figure 8. Decimalisation truckles to a bloody revolution in France (just as driving on the right truckles to Napoleon╒s armies), but it ignores a lot of history.
Having lived for several years in countries that have decimal money, I can speak with feeling about its disadvantages. Shop-keepers can cheat you easily: they can move a decimal point one place too many; they can forget the zero after the point when the cents are in units. A bank clerk once tried to credit me with fifteen dollars instead of a hundred and fifty. One cunning small merchant was fond of writing $5.08 as $5.8 (big opportunities there when it came to adding up bills).
The real horror of a decimal coinage comes when you try to split a dollar (or new pound) three ways. In fact, you can╒t divide a hundred-piece at all except by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25 or 50. I need not go into the number of ways you can split an old pound. True, 7 and 9 won╒t go, but you can always turn your pound into a guinea (one Straits dollar, incidentally, is worth 2s 4d, and there are just nine of those to the guinea). We have in Britain, till 1971, the handiest and most reasonable coinage in the world, and now ╤ to please the daughters of bloody revolutions ╤ we are told (yes, told; no talk of a plebiscite) to give it up for something blatantly inferior. And one of the finest of all coins ╤ the half-crown or British kupang or true ╥bit╙, which turned our pound into a real piece of eight, not a sham one like the modern dollar ╤ is already stigmatised as ╥awkward╙.
The British people will undoubtedly (not that they have much choice in the matter) accept decimalisation just as they have accepted other, undreamt-of-even-after-a-cheese-supper, irrationalities, insults, and con-tricks. But their true life is lived in spite of the creep of totalitarianism, in the community and not in the State. To them the crown is still a real unit, called the dollar or Oxford scholar or just Oxford, and it will continue to be made up of two half-dollars or tosheroons. They will perhaps invent a mythical but very real, piece of ninety cents called a top-of-the-rock, which will do well for all trinitarian divisions (note how decimalisation, like horrible Brother who-ever-it-is in ╥Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister,╙ tries piously to confute the Arian). There may even be an imaginary hundred-and-ten cent (or new-penny) piece called a soccer.
We are likely, sooner or later, to have litres and kilos, the most unmanageable units of measurement ever devised. For a kilo of grapes is too much, and a litre of beer will make drinking a burden. You will remember the old man in George Orwell╒s dystopia who says, ╥Why can╒t I have a proper pint? All these litres keeps me running.╙ Might it not be appropriate for the Government to plan its ultimate decimalisation for 1984?
Meanwhile, cram your Christmas pudding with sixpences, awkward coins as they are to the decimators of tradition. And, while the spirit is on you, make a cache of your halfpennies: some day they will serve as mini-plaques of the Golden Hind, acceptable presents. Devise party games with threepenny bits. Enjoy your twelve days of Christmas before they too are decimalised. A very happy duodenum to you.
