DaveG38

To be fair, the seller makes clear in the description that they are copies.

rumpUK - i.e. what's left after Scotland departs. That doesn't make any sense. The UK is England Scotland Wales and N Ireland. If Scotland leaves, then the UK is England Wales and N Ireland. There's no 'r' about it. Though it does make you think : would the Queen have any say about it? The road tax was originally designed to build/repair roads, but it's been many a long decade since that pretence was maintained. Road Tax, like National Insurance, is 'just another tax' used by the Government of the day for whatever it sees fit. As you rightly say, the roads in England are pretty awful with the possible exception of the motorways, constantly being patched up/relaid. rUk is simply a descriptor, or a convenience if you like, in debates to indicate that portion of the existing UK that would be left after Scotland's independence. It has no status as the official name of the country - that will, as you say, remain the UK.

rumpUK - i.e. what's left after Scotland departs. Don't you mean England, as Wales is a principality and NI is a province. So England is the only bit left with Country status. I agree that the structure of the four countries, provinces, principalities is complicated and I don't think it helps to get into the question of whether its the UK, Great Britain etc. At the end of the day, the internationally recognised 'country' at present is the UK (except when playing football) and if Scotland leaves it seems likely to me that this name will be collectively retained by England, Wales and NI as the title is internationally understood. Describing it as rUK simply underlines the diminished position following the withdrawal of Scotland from this framework.

rumpUK - i.e. what's left after Scotland departs.

For me the biggest problem that the independence debate is causing is to the potential relationships between the Scots and the English, regardless of the outcome of the vote. Alex Salmond would have everyone believe that it will all be very amicable and civilised and friendly, but I'm not so sure. Certainly, as soon as the UK government made the position plain about the currency the whole debate turned very acrimonious, even though the UK government's position and the reasons for it were perfectly logical and crystal clear. The SNP's idea that they could insist on a currency union and that everything will carry on much as before was always a ridiculous position, since divorce is rarely a nice happy experience. It seems to me that the SNP hasn't factored into their thinking the way in which Scotland would be regarded by rUK. AS seemed quite affronted by the idea that Scotland would be a foreign land, which goes to show the naive way in which the SNP think this whole process can be managed. Post-independence Scotland will be a foreign country and rUK will have no need to give any regard to it, so far as it's own policies go. Being larger, both economically and structurally, rUK can, if its politicians wish, introduce policies that run counter to the best interests of Scotland, and no amount of bleating by the SNP will have any impact on this. Then there's the issue of how companies and individuals regard the Scots in future. It seems to me that there will be a likely legacy of bitterness that may end up being detrimental to those Scots who live in England and it may well be that companies in future will take a different attitude to Scottish employees. For instance, if Scotland does go for independence and isn't granted immediate membership of the EU, as seems likely, what would be the position regarding Scots in employment in rUK? Some of the options here could become quite discriminatory as the rUK government decides how to deal with the presence of alien workers in the country, and maybe takes a very bitter view of Scotland in its political thinking. And that's all irrespective of the attitude to individual Scots in England from the English in general. However much the SNP may want to have a nice amicable arrangment it may find that attitudes harden on both sides of the border and that overall the situation becomes a far from satisfactory one. I personally think that things may never be quite the same again, at least not for a long time, regardless of the outcome of the vote. Even if the vote is 'no', it's rather like a marriage that survives an affair by one party - the attitude of the other is unlikely to be as it was before the affair, no matter how much one side forgives the other.

The last Scottish king of this name was Alexander III. He was the last king of the House of Dunkeld and reigned from 1249 to 1286, and was, surprise, surprise the son of Alexander II. So, Mr Salmond would become Alexander IV - sounds better than King Salmond I, with Queen Sturgeon alongside him.Not sure why you'd think a commoner would become a King Dave, i'm sure IF Scotland were to gain independence whoever was the Leader of said Independent country would certainly not become a King or Queen, perhaps president, but certainly not royalty.I don't think Salmond would - the comment simply follows from the spoof pound coin with Alex Salmond's head on it.

The last Scottish king of this name was Alexander III. He was the last king of the House of Dunkeld and reigned from 1249 to 1286, and was, surprise, surprise the son of Alexander II. So, Mr Salmond would become Alexander IV - sounds better than King Salmond I, with Queen Sturgeon alongside him.

Is that some sort of April fools of an April fools? No, I'm sure the Salmond would love to be seen as King Alexander IV!

And the laugh is that because it's April Fools Day everyone thinks this is a joke........

I stole the timeline from Wikipedia My first computing experience was was with CP/M (anyone remember that - Digital research) using a Z80 card in an Apple ][, we had a massive brute of a hard disk with the amazing capacity of 5MB! Later we migrated to DOS and then Santa Cruz Xenix - using a Tandon AT with a 100MB disk (this hardware cost £2000 in 1986) My favourite operating system has to be RiscOS running on an Acorn Archimedes, though Amiga Dos was interesting So yes Bob, I am that old, and I haven't written a line of code for over 20 years now,so everything getting a bit rusty David Too cool David. I started with a TRS-80, with two floppy drives (one for the Operating system), with a fabulous 48k Memory board. Then on to a Olivetti PC with PCos operating system, then IBM PC, then IBM XT (5 MB disk), Multiple IBM AT's, Dell (multiple), and currently have a HP Omni27, Multiple channel, with Beats Audio! It been a great ride! When I first started in electronics it was tube technology, then tranisters, Then integrated circuits, then large scale IC's, then PC's on a chip (286,386.486, etc), and now multi-Core, and multi channel... Your TRS-80 sounds just like the ICL DRS8801 I first used around 1979/80. A basic word processor using large floppy discs and with two drives, one of which was used to load the operating system. It had a brown screen and yellow characters on screen and the delete function worked the opposite way to a modern PC - the cursor had to be ahead of the character to be deleted. It took me a little while to get used to the change when my first real PC arrived in 1990 or so.

Seller is from Leeds, it explains it all. Why? Is Leeds full of molesters?And sheep. Baaaaaaah owwwwwww Plenty of wellies sold in Leeds then?

Seller is from Leeds, it explains it all. Why? Is Leeds full of molesters?

Sam Fox is old as Peck and a carpet muncher. Spoilsport! Us old gits still need some fantasies left.

I gather that the reverse is going to be decided by open competition, so come on you lot and get cracking. I, for one, am willing to suggest Samantha Fox on the reverse - if there's room.

I'm slightly intrigued by the economics of counterfeiting. You've got the cost of the brass, not much I admit, then there's the casting process (most seem to be cast) including the smelting costs etc. Add to this the problems of getting the milling roughly right and the edge inscription and I'm surprised any amateur can make a profit out of it, even when carried out on a large scale. At the end of the day, it's a pound coin, which won't even buy you a cup of coffee, so getting large numbers into circulation in order to see a profit looks very tricky as well. It's not as though you can take bag fulls to the bank to pay into an account - even the most clueless bank clerk will pick up that something is wrong when they see bags full of what appear to be fake coins. Bank CCTV would likely pick up who was responsible and then its just a case of sorting out the account and sending in the boys in blue. So how do they circulate them in any quantities I wonder?

Mine's says it was a 1975 edition - are there two books? Mine also has Mr Cope's signature, but sadly not Rayner's, so it's impaired.

Nationwide. I dare say each bank charges what they see fit. Mine was with Natwest - all done and dusted in a few minutes. Easy and £10 wasn't too bad on a £1000 transaction. What if your payment was only £40 like OP's? That's an extra 25% on your overheads! That's different. I wouldn't have paid using IBAN in that case. My comment was really concerned with the difference in charges, not the ratio of charges to cost, which would be even worse in the case you quote.

Nationwide. I dare say each bank charges what they see fit. Mine was with Natwest - all done and dusted in a few minutes. Easy and £10 wasn't too bad on a £1000 transaction.

Where's this £25 charge come from? I've just bought £1000 of coins from a German dealer and the charge for bank transfer was £10, not £25. That includes any transaction charges for conversion to Euros.

Sorry azda, but what's the issue here? From your post it seems they bought it from you and then tried onward selling at a higher price, which seems fair enough if they can. Or is there something I've missed?

Not hard to find. Ebay is littered with them, starting at around £99. Quite why anybody would think them rare when they are all over the site when you put in the search term '2014 Britannia' I really don't know.

There's some very pretty sheep around us. I'd better not mention the lambs or I shall be accused of being a lambophile. Mint sauce. Baaaaah!

Well, I bought it as a 1720 not 1720/17, but from a foreign dealer, so I wasn't sure. The shape of the '0' is somewhat irregular perhaps suggesting it is over something else. However, since I posted I have checked out London Coins archive and had a look at web images using Google Images and it seems that the 1720 does have an odd shaped '0' whereas the overdate seems to have a much more regular one. I'm coming to the view that mine was correctly attributed by the seller as a plain 1720. Either way, that's another gap filled!!

Hi all. Here's a close up of the date of my latest purchase, a 1720 halfcrown. Is this a 1720 plain or a 1720/17? Any ideas?

Prices on ebay are already softening. One in its RM packaging went for £205 earlier followed by a similar one at £64. Packaged coins within the set were going as BINs at £200 then went down to £150 or so, but prices started to drop down to around £70 for a single UNC example. Circulated coins seem to have started out at around £60-80, but then dropped to the £25-30 mark and now one has gone for £7.55. Normal service should be resumed shortly.