Chris Perkins

On the 12th and 13th of December Barclays Bank charged me 2x £30 per transaction beyond my overdraft limit. I hadn't kept an eye on the account. I got dad to pay some cash in and that sorted it. I was quite pissed about the £60 charge. So I looked online and apparently there has been quite a bit of publicity about bank charges recently. I found a very official looking letter template that cited other cases of companies taking fees that were not proportionate to actual costs. So I sent them this letter with a threat of account closure and court action if the money was not returned. And hey presto, £60 hit my account today! They don't want court hassle, so refunding is much easier. So, if you're annoyed about bank charges, claim them back! PM me if you want to the the letter used. Unbelievably effective I thought.

Isn't the Queen already head of the French state, what with her pedigree and the lack of French nobles since the revolution?

The bold purple on p7 is just to remind me that that part needs attention (dates checking etc)! I should have mentioned that. I can't take the credit for the wonderful and clever use of colour, that was the page designer. Worth every penny though, it really sets it apart I think.

Yes, I think the 'Claim' is far scarcer than the 'Bill'. The prices are still subject to adjustment before the book gets published.

The 1960's version sold 1.75 million copies! Which is absolutely breathtaking, but unlikely to be quite so many this time round. In the 60's of course coins were still in circulation from 1816. I do think though that a book exposing the myths about decimal coinage will be a good idea, and I do believe that lots of members of the public will find a book useful, even if it is just to have a record of all the decimal coins in one place.

I think I prefer Piedfort, I'll check to see what word the Royal Mint use. And I think you might be right with the Fidei Defensor too, I'll check. Unless that's because it used to be Defender of the faith and then at some point because of the multi culti thing became Defender of the faiths. I found a pro for the layout and she did a wonderful job didn't she.

The next book expected in the Rotographic family will be 'Check your Change 2007'. The first new edition since 1970! It's another important milestone in terms of layout too because for the first time colour has been used within the listings (not just for the images) to give it a very modern feel but also to make it easier to read. Pages 3 to 45 can be downloaded to inspect here: http://www.rotographic.com/books/CYC3to33.pdf The basic information in what you see was put together by our very own forum member Kuhli. The PDF has very low resolution images to make the file small (total about 2.5mb). A bit of an international effort so far: concept in the USA, typeset in India, coin photos done in Germany and layout designed in the UK. In about 6 months it will be printed in Latvia. Let me know what you all think.

From the subject name I thought this was spam at first!

I have the same problem too when I'm in the UK and have tons of coins to take on a plane! Fortunately I can leave them with my dad usually. What is the scrap value of 10kg bronze?

You often have French in your signature and I'm sure you mentioned it before! I know that you collect German 3mk coins.

That's right. What's left of the French Empire are 'proper' colonies where the French have more control. I think that French Guyana is the only one with the Euro....it might even be the last French colony?! Oli wil know, he seems to be into French things. I have French ancestors you know.

And down south you can wander between Kent, Sussex and Surrey and be astounded by the miriad of local differences!

No! They have long since had an independent government and full control over their own currency. I do know though that French Guyana, nextdoor to Brazil I believe had to also adopt the Euro.

I have a Spectrum Emulator for the PC somewhere, and a program that slows your PC down so it runs Speccy stuff at the original speed. Even last year when I got hold of a copy of the original Elite, it still kept me busy for hours (once I'd re learn't what all the keys do). A superb game combining arcade shoot 'em up and commerce skills, but the most amazing thing was the size of the 'world'. You could visit countless planets and there always seemed like there were thousands more (all contained in 48k of memory, tiny even in comparison to a floppy disc)! But....the most difficult thing wasn't the space pirates, it was landing the bloody thing in the hexagonal post box!!

I had a Speccy +3 which had a disc drive!!! Super quick games loads, just as quick as a modern PC. I got quite good at hacking the tape games and dumping the code onto 3" disc so that in the end I had 20 games on an Amstrad 3" floppy. Do you remember Elite? Now that was an amazing game, far far ahead of it's time.

The only way would be for eBay to check each listing before it gets added. But they don't give a toffee flea (now there's an interesting expression that hasn't slipped out in ages!) judging by their rubbish communication with users and the fact there is no phone number shown. Ebay is one massive automated money making machine, and as long as you're paying the fees you can almost get away with anything.

I loved Spectrums, used to like to programme them in BASIC. I even wrote a programme for a maths project once to enable me to generate random numbers within a certain range and study the statistics of the resulting numbers. I got top marks for that.

Yes but without the young people scampering for the latest things, we'd be an email group and not a forum, and we'd all be using Sinclair Spectrums with 16 colours and a modem the size and speed of a tortoise!

Yes, I run IE7 now and have noticed the Firefox features that have been added! I'd use Firefox too, but it really is not stable on my system for some reason.

I used Firefox for a little while last year to try out, but I had big problems with it. Every 20 seconds of so it would freeze and not respond for about 10 seconds.

It's because he put a URL to the picture in the message instead of using the forum add file software.

Yes, that was him!

The old owner of Rotographic used to sell some books to a coin shop in Canterbury, but when I took over I was unable to establish any contact, so I'm afraid I don't know of any.

I check emails in the morning usually and it is awful. Once I had 75 new messages, all spam except 2 of them! They only do it because it's easy and anonymous even if they generate very little business, it doesn't really matter because you can send the same message to millions of email addresses and then move on to the next. I think it's such a world problem that diplomatic pressure should be put on countries like Russia, China, Korea etc to make it more difficult for the people there doing the vast majority of it.

They certainly don't in Korea, which is part of Eastern Spamland.