On Tanners and Shillings

What Ho Proles!

Just a brief update tonight as I’m out early in the morning to do a little work at the local Tory Party HQ. You wouldn’t believe the demands they make of me, but I suppose these are the sacrifices one makes to be a prospective Tory M.P. I hear the local Labour Party lot demand blood sacrifices for their candidates so I suppose I get away quite light really.

The point of this post is, however, to recount something that happened as My Man was bringing me my nightly Ovaltine. He has a way, as you know, of creeping around the house. Tonight, his nocturnal lurkings meant that he caught me in a compromising position with my dressing gown. But before I had chance to reprimand him, he came out with a saying that had me immediately reaching for my copy of Nigel Rees’ A Word in Your Shell Like. He told me that I was looking like I’d ‘lost a shilling and found a tanner’. Of course, I may still be feeling a mite down on account of England’s lamentable defeat at the hands of the Croats yesterday. My disappointment, you understand, would be the same if England had lost at netball, hockey, or even synchronized knitting: an English defeat is an English defeat. I care little for the sport, but love the country.

But that is not my point. I was intrigued by the saying since, surely, if I had indeed lost a shilling and found a tanner then I would simply have kept looking for my original shilling. A shilling can hardly turn into a tanner, so it is a tanner gained. The shilling must be still around where I lost it and so, when I did eventually find it, I’d be a tanner up on the whole deal.

It’s an explanation I offered to my man, but the clear logic of it seemed to pass him by. I bewail the slow intellects of proles everywhere. Shillings must amass under every hedgerow in prole shires across the land.

Okay, must get into the four poster. H.Q. awaits the Hon. J.P.M. in the AM.

Toodle pip pip.