DaveG38

That's 'cos I have it. As Rob says £1200 at DNW. Of course Nicholson also had the other type of 1689 where the ET is to the left of the busts. I'm still looking for one of these if any exist beyond Nicholson's.

Despite not wanting to clean it, it would probably improve considerably if soaked in olive oil for a few months. That should kill off all the bue green hue and leave a decent dark brown. It won't do anything for the pox on the reverse, but I think it would make the whole coin more attractive. Views anybody?

Well done Michael-Roo for posting the article. Make of it what you will, though I still feel that the evidence and logic of die production means that the dates are definitely 1695. Just two allied points: 1. My coin is the bottom one on page 2. After this article was published, I gave it the olive oil treatment with the result that the coin is now a lovely chocolate brown without all that surface green caused by being in the ground. As I said in an earlier post, I'd put mine at VF maybe a touch better, but with some patchy corrosion. According to the seller, my coin was dug up in Suffolk. The one offered for sale in the US for $4700 is possibly the one at the top of page 2, which is the property of an American collector - he also was/is the owner of the centre coin on page 2. 2. For reasons I don't understand Spink were very reluctant to include this type in their standard catalogue. When I suggested it should be I got a very snotty note to the effect that they couldn't include every minor type in their publication. I get that, but this is scarcely minor - in fact it must be the first obverse of William's reign, which changes the whole view of the copper series of coins of that period. Furthermore, the legend change is far more significant than the existence of an extra curl or berry on Victoria's hair, yet they were happy to include this kind of variety in the 1860-61 penny series, where the differences are truly minor. However, I haven't bought a copy of Spink in recent years so maybe my grumble is unjustified and it is now included. Finally, on the question of the recent sale, I was sure it was Mark Rasmussen, but if not then one of the other dealers in rarities. I recall it because my article and name appeared in the description of the coin, which the more I think about it, I'm sure was the Nicholson example.

File size is too big by a mile to send via PM. Let me have an email address and I can do it that way.

I wrote an article for Coin News on this type a few years ago. In that, I identified what I thought were the 5 known examples. Yours appears to be the 6th. The date is not in fact 1696, but 1695 - the last digit is an italic 5 not a 6, made difficult to read through corrosion, but is obvious when put alongside a normal 1696 example. If you are interested, I can pm you a copy of the article, which explains in more detail than I can here.

I paid £650 for mine, about 4 years ago. It was worth it, as it is pretty much VF+ grade, but has some corrosion through being in the ground. Overall, its about the same grade as the original 'Cowley' find.

I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that Mark Rasmussen sold one (it may have been the Nicholson example) for £2200, I think, a few years ago now.

Don't get hung up about the number of years. Just my bad maths. It was 40 years payments followed by 30 years accumulating value. As has been said there was a life assurance element, which helped. Even so, we were very surprised at the final surrender value.

No, I believe it was a 30 year plan so it came to a natural end in 1988. It then sat moribund for another years quietly accumulating interest, until we discovered it, and found to our surprise that it was still current. A nice little gift though.

This is an inteersting point that my wife had the advantage of recently. Her dad took out an insurance policy on her as a baby in 1947 paying just 2d a week. This continued until around 1988, when payments ceased. When we went to cash it in some 30 years later, we thought it might be worth £50 or so. Imagine the surprise to find its value had risen over 60 years to about £1700 or so.

Where?

Here's an optimist on the US eBay site. What is interesting is that he 'may not ship to the UK.' https://www.ebay.com/itm/Rare-Elizabeth-2-collectable-coins-1971-1988-1985-One-pound-Elizabeth-II/324026633296?hash=item4b717e0c50:g:k2oAAOSw94pdPyBO

I can get Tesco slots in a few days time with no problem now.

There are but in N. America. Ooops! He must be red fox, but apart from the head he's nothing like a red fox. Body colour is all wrong, tail colour and shape isn't right. Not sure what type he is, except he's definitely a fox.

Here's my regular visiting fox, just having a snooze in the late afternoon. As far as I can judge, he's either a grey fox, or he's a hybrid grey/red. Pic is a bit grainy as its taken through glass.

There are two on ebay at the moment with bidding at £205 and £255!!! And that's with more than a day to go. Paid £3.49 for mine.

Not a solicitous call, but a comedian and a spoof email thread. Great stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QdPW8JrYzQ or this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Uc-cztsJo

I have a complete set of these mags and I have considered doing this in the past. All it would take is scanning the pages into the PC and organising them for a website and for reading. Not too hard. More tricky if you want to be able to search for specific articles or entries. The problem is that I don't know who now owns the copyright. I knew a lady who was a proof reader for them, but she wasn't able to help with anybody to contact now, for permission. At the end of the day, there are some 25 years of mags, 12 per year excluding those when they came out every fortnight, and say an average of 80 pages per issue. That's 24000+ scans. Could do it, but not if, the moment I publish them, someone comes along and says 'oi they are mine'. Having said this, I'm talking about reproducing the whole mag, not just selected articles. The problem with the latter is choosing which ones, especially as it wouldn't be long before demands grew for more and more of the content to be made available. Plus, of course, there is still the matter of copyright.

Correct, but no 1967 penny for you.

This is a simple one. What sentence was used by BT engineers to check the correct operation of all the alphabet keys on the keyboard on a telex machine? The correct answerer doesn't even get a 1967 penny as a prize.

I have diabetes and my other half has asthma, and we are both over 70, but we don't quality either.

I'm leaving the garden for now. Spending time giving the cars a thorough cleaning and polishing. Its amazing how much algae and other grot there is in all the nooks and crannies. They've never looked so good or been so well cleaned. However, does anybody have any ideas for a suitable treatment for a black canvass roof that is beginning to grow mildew and green patches. It doesn't matter how much I scrub the green patches and mucky green water runs off, I still can't get rid of it all. Also any ideas for re-blacking the roof?

Well done that man!

You are all correct that it is a green and red stamp, but the logic that leads to this is quite extensive. As a starting point, if the first student sees 4 red stamps on the other two students foreheads then he knows immediately that he has 2 green on his own. And vice versa if he sees two green. Hence if he says he doesn't know this can't be the solution. This conclusion is one that the next student understands so he then goes through all the possible combinations to conclude that he doesn't know either, and so on. Each successive question to a student results in the student analysing what the previous student(s) concluded, and taking the problem forwards. By the time we get to the fifth round, the student has examined all the previous possibilities and knows that these can all be discounted, and so he comes to his own definitive conclusion - one red and one green. I could go through each stage with all the permutations and the conclusions drawn, but there aren't enough hours in the day to do this. Try it if you want to, but it takes many pages of 'what ifs' to get to the answer.

OK, here's a complex one. Three logic sudents are sat in class in front of their professor. He shows them 8 stamps, 4 green and 4 red, and sticks 2 stamps on the foreheads of each student and places the other 2 face down on his desk. He then asks the first student if he knows which stamps are on his own forehead. The student thinks for a minute and says 'no.' The professor then asks the second student and again the student says 'no' to the same question. The professor then asks the third student the same question and gets the same answer. The professor then goes back to the first student and again poses the same question. The student thinks for a bit longer, but again says 'no' he doesn't know which stamps are on his forehead. Finally, the professor asks the second student the question again. The student thinks for some time and says 'yes' the stamps on my forehead are......????? Each student can only see the stamps on the other students foreheads, students cannot remove stamps and there are no mirrors or other reflective surfaces in the room. In other words this has to be solved by logic alone. What stamps does the second student have on his forehead?