Toe in the Water

An Ancestral Herring

An Ancestral Herring

My father used to repeat this riddle that he’d learned as a kid:

If a herring and a half cost three ha’pence, how much does a herring cost?

Seeing that not only the penny has long disappeared from British currency, and the ha’pence (halfpenny piece) even longer, one can get an idea of just how old the question is. The question is almost meaningless now, and I know from experience that asking it merely invokes history lessons on the intricacies of extinct British coin systems.

Which is a pity, since it’s actually quite a clever and amusing little jest. It depends, you see, upon the deliberate confusion induced by saying thee ha’pence, rather than one-and-a-half pennies. That’s what it is, after all. And the moment we see that is the instant we realise how simple the problem is. Obviously, a herring costs a penny (another indicator of the great age of the riddle).

The story does offer evidence of the fact that I carry around both my own history but also that of my parents’ time. In this way my memory includes the lore (and, I hope, the wisdom) of over a century of experience and learning. It’s really no wonder that I often feel like a dinosaur that never evolved into a bird.


Word count: 214