1949threepence

That's what I originally thought, but then Jerry said that the bidding on the better one of the two started at about £4k - not sure what happened after that.

It seemed muddled thinking on their part, Pete. They shouldn't have split the two coins up. Mind, if they hadn't done, I'm betting it would have gone to the buyer of the 105.

Thanks. Yes, the F105 and F106 were split up, even though they were part of the same original Freeman lot (No 65) from the 1984 Christies sale. They set all the lots with a starting estimate of less than £100 from the rest, and they were shown on the last couple of pages. I only discovered it quite by chance. It's lot No 3393.

I thought that about the VIGTORIA. Yeah, strange about the 1862 halfpenny date. There's no sign of any sale in the realised prices?

There were two. I don't think either sold. Meanwhile the a/UNC 1864 crosslet with numbers scratched in the obverse field, fetched £9k ! - although you can't see the numbers on LCA's photo at all.

I went for the self same coin, bidding £500 by e mail. If real time on line bidding had been possible, I'd have definitely gone higher. As it is I did get the Freeman 106, lot no 3393, which was the other part of Freeman's lot 65 in the 1984 Christies sale. £90 hammer £105.30 with juice. VF and well worth it.

Which one was that, Stuart?

Cheers Pete.

Just looked at the results. Of the two I bid for, I managed to get the Freeman 106 for £90 hammer, but missed out on the Nicer Freeman 105, which went for £650, and I only bid £500. If it had been live I'd have gone higher.

Sorry, but you're never going to get them looking as good as the day they were minted. Also, if you're serious about collecting coins, you won't clean, and especially don't polish them, as you will substantially negate any potential future value, as well as their collectability. My advice if you're going to collect the £1 coin series from 1983 to date, is to just keep a lookout for reasonable specimens, and retain the best you see for any given year, supplementing as necessary if a better one comes along. Clearly, you've only got a limited time frame before the old coins are demonetised, so you'd better get busy. Unfortunately, the one pound coin has probably seen more of a battering over the years than almost any other denomination. Hence many of the early years are now really looking their age. There are a number of varieties, and some are going to be more difficult to obtain than others. The 1986 and 1988 are difficult, and will be extremely tough to get in decent condition, unless you decide to buy, say from e bay. This Royal MInt link gives you all the varieties and mintages of the £1 coin. Good luck.

Varieties are great to search for and collect, but if you're not careful, they can start to go on forever, with the merest difference from norm, such as one extra border tooth, counted as a variety. For that reason, I limit myself to Freeman types, and the odd well known Gouby. No disrespect to those who want to go the extra mile. Good luck to them. But just not for me at this precise moment in time. With specific regard to Edward VII (and this is one penny run I've started but not finished), I'd go for all the Freemans and leave it at that. Although I appreciate there are many micro varieties (even in just one year, 1902) as we have seen from the old coin monthly articles that Richard very kindly e mailed to some of us recently.

This is actually my current specialism, except I also collect varieties. If I was going for dates only and no variety, I'd go for GEF minimum. As I collect varieties, some of which are extremely rare, I've had to settle for near fine in some cases. ETA: No, collecting by date isn't "obsolete" - and even if it were, I'd still collect by date as it's what I like doing. Don't allow your collecting preferences to be influenced by what others tell you, or what you hear and read.

That's true. However, as Peter would say, it's now a thrower.

Amazon had a cloud issue yesterday, which caused considerable disruption - link Draw your own conclusions about trusting anything important to the cloud.

Not in person. Made a couple of e mail bids, which are obviously in the lap of the Gods, as unable to influence the outcome on the day, if circumstances prevent actual attendance.

Absolutely. They've got to get up very early in the morning to get one past us. Even if one doesn't spot a scam/liar, another one or several will.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not decrying cloud per se. It's a fantastic resource, and I know that the storage is replicated. But anything that I personally consider valuable, gets stored on a memory stick and held in a place only I know about. It's probably my suspicious and sceptical nature that's at the root of it

If you're interested, you can obtain a copy of the Christie's catalogue for the Freeman sale of 23.10.84, from The Fitzwilliam Museum. Only a copy, but better than nothing - link Scroll down to Christies and you'll see that the sale is there. There is an e mail address you can contact.

Yes, it does use the so called "cloud", which is just a somewhat confusing name for personal stuff being stored on various third party servers who lease out space to domain owners. The obvious idea is that you either don't have a hard drive for personal storage, or if you do, space on it is saved, because your documents are stored elsewhere. It's OK for unimportant material, but there's no way I'd trust it with anything important. Quite apart from information being compromised by hostile elements, there's always the possibility that something will go badly wrong and whatever you have there will be lost.

As far as bulk transfer of many thousands of e mails from one platform to another is concerned, experience has shown me that this is always a king sized pain in the arse. However, you might find this link useful.

To compromise you could set up an entirely new account, and keep your old one running as an essentially defunct account, but one you could still keep checking. You could use a web based e mail account such as hotmail, who now call themselves "outlook" and are a lot better than they used to be, or g mail. Just change your advertised e mail address to the new one so that more and more customers get used to it. But you would still have the reassurance that the old one isn't dead in case any long standing customers send to that. Why don't you have a website, out of interest?

It could be a bot or some other form of malware, but to be honest it has all the hallmarks of a spammer who has spoofed your e mail address and the undelivered messages are backscatter from that. I agree about running a virus check, and I'd also as a matter of urgency, change your password and e mail account name.

Yes, agreed. It's beginning to get on my tits now, as well as driving me cuckoo

A little bird told me it's actually 16.25. Although I didn't want to beak in, I just couldn't help having a gander.

Unofficial counterstamping of coins was especially common practice during the Victorian & Edwardian eras. Sometimes it was an entire name, like J.T.Smith, or other times it was a slogan such as "votes for women". Obviously various individuals, for different reasons, obtained letter/number punches and deliberately counterstamped coins. It could be done officially as well, as explained here