A 1959 Penny

Can you imagine a 1959 penny? Can you picture it? Even if, like me, you're too young to remember the old money you must have seen them. I certainly wasn't around in 1959. It was the year my Dad was born in. Anyway, the old penny is a big round coin with the Queen's head on one side and Britannia on the other. The ones with the ships on them are ha'pennies. You can get that idea in your head. You can see one of those old pennies, can't you? Imagine holding it. You feel the metal on the palm of your hand. Can't you?

Got you! Because what you are imagining is a complete fantasy. You might as well imagine holding the Holy Grail or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You see, you can imagine something that has never existed, that never was. You just did. My point is that the things we can imagine don't have to be real in any way.

But hold on, I know what you're thinking; that was a mean trick. How were you meant to know that no pennies were issued in 1959? Dad once said it was proof he was born penniless. He wasn't really but Dad can never resist a really bad joke.

Anyway, even if you are eighty, how were you meant to know that no pennies were issued in 1959? You've got better things to do with your time than look up things like that. I mean any anyone who knows a fact like that must be really sad; a candidate for the complete geek of the year award. But knowing it might be important. As I keep telling you, just to ram my point home, there were no pennies minted in 1959 but Ha'pennies were minted; a whole mountain of them were. You try and flog a 1959 ha'penny; even a pristine, shiny, uncirculated one and you won't get much for it.

But, just suppose you found a 1959 penny and it was authenticated (that means proven not to be a fake, I'm sure you did know that but not everyone would) and, since none others exist, it would be deemed to be unique. What do you think would happen then? How much do you think it would be worth? You might get forty grand, even more, for it. Now you're imagining it. Well let's be honest, it's the auction you're picturing, as the price shoots up to a new record price for a penny. Can you hear the auctioneer's voice in your head? You must have seen them on Flog It or another antiques show. Maybe you were visiting your granny, on a Sunday afternoon, and couldn't get out of watching a programme like that. I'll bet you had to sit through "Song of Praise" and all. Some grannies have no understanding of the concept of cruel and unnatural forms of torture. Worse still, is the truly terrifying thought that they might know exactly what they are doing; they might want to torture you. By the way if you are a granny I wasn't meaning to insult you. Grannies are great but try laying off the "Songs of Praise", it's a hazardous substance.

Well anyway if you did have a coin, like that, you won't want the hammer to come down too soon. The longer you have to wait for that, the richer you get. What I am saying is possible. I can prove it.

You see what I'm talking about did happen with the 1954 penny. Several hundred 1954 pennies were struck. They were not meant to be issued. They were all meant to be melted down. One was saved. It sold for about Thirty thousand about ten years ago. If you don't believe me, google it. I have estimated forty thousand for a 1959 one because rare coins keep going up in value. So you'll see I'm right and a 1959 penny might exist, except it doesn't. But I'll bet I got you imagining it again.

I'm a chancer. I don't mean that I'm some sort of conman; it's just that I do what I need to. I make a few bob on eBay selling coins, books, clothes and CDs; whatever I can sell. It's a chancer's game. You must know that already. I don't mean everyone selling on eBay is a chancer. Most of them aren't. It's just that my skill is in buying it cheaply and flogging it back at a profit. I speculate to accumulate. A few weeks ago I bought a lot of silver thruppences for four quid. Amongst them was a 1927. I wasn't even that brilliant, no were near uncirculated condition, barely even good. I sold it for sixty quid. But I still couldn't figure it out, because I'd checked its value. I emailed the buyer. He told me he'd dealt in coins for years and 1927 thruppences were much rarer than the books said. Well I wasn't complaining.

You can be anonymous on eBay. So long as you deal honestly and squarely, you have nothing to worry about. That suits me. I once sold some coins to someone and a cheque came back from Coutts, they are the bankers to the Queen, don't you know, and the name on the cheque was Sir Such an' Such. The coins weren't even that special.

The bank account and credit card I use aren't mine. But I can't trade on eBay without them and I have to make money somehow. I bet that's got your attention. But I'm not stealing from anyone. I've kept it in the family. I use my Dad's account and credit card. Did I have you going again? Did you think I was an internet scammer, stealing people's credit cards?

You might think it's easy to flog stuff on eBay but I've really had to flat roof it, if you're over thirty that means work hard. Now I've insulted not just Grannies but everyone over thirty. I'm doing really well.

I think Alexa Chung is a complete babe. She's well peng (buy a slang dictionary or google it). I think about her a lot. I have this fantasy that she might buy something from me on eBay and then I'd need to email her and I'd slip in some interesting things about music and she'd email me back wanting to know more about what I think and she'd realise I was dizzy ( you really do need a slang dictionary) and want to meet me. Then I'd get to hang with the Klaxons and Kate Nash. I'd be really tight (think about it in the context of the sentence you might work out what it means) with them. Or maybe not.

All my mates are online. I use a false name and the pic isn't of me but I chat into the night with them. It's all great jokes; except I don't want them in my yard. I don't want anyone in my yard. There'd be too much to explain. Like why I'm not at school. Anyway they might trash the place.

I don't go out much. I go to the post office and local shops, to post the eBay stuff and buy milk and that, in the late afternoon. That way no one asks why I'm not at School. Officially I'm home schooled but that's too complicated to explain. Anyway most people think home schooled kids are weirdo sky pilots or nerdy geniuses. I'm neither. After Mum died Dad kept changing jobs and moving from place to place. He said it was because he's a physicist and he didn't want to teach in School and universities keep dropping the subject but there was more to it than that. Everything had seemed to go wrong, for him, after Mum died. Her death was such a shock. It turned out she'd been having an affair and she'd tried to end id it and the man, the papers called him her lover (I'm not going to use his name) ended up stabbing her. That was three years ago and my life was so different. I wasn't a weirdo loner then.

I was very sad and kept having nightmares. Dad just seemed to just fall to pieces. Last year he had to leave work on an ill heath retirement on grounds of his depression. He said the university were happy for him to go to save on the number of redundancies. I think he just couldn't face still doing it. He couldn't face doing much.

He keeps telling me that he's realized that he can't protect anyone; that we make up images of the future to try and make the world seem certain but there is no certainty. He says a big part of his manhood had been taken from him in a way he couldn't begin to explain. He says he forgives Mum for the affair he just wishes he could have protected her. I understand what he means. I wish I could have protected her too.

At the funeral Dad read the poem "Remember" by Christina Rossetti. It is the one with the line; "When you can no more hold me by the hand, Not I half turning to go, yet turning to stay." I could hear the crack in his voice and he had to stop for a little while after reading that line, to stop himself from crying. I wanted to cry to. Mum had always loved that poem.

It was then that Dad started to move from job to job. We kept moving from city to city. I got sick of always being the new kid in the class. The way I spoke never fitted. Being tall and thin, with glasses, and having an IQ of anything above 100 clearly constitutes offensive behaviour, in the eyes of some people. It was easier not to start me in new schools. I didn't need the hassle; so I decided I wanted to be home schooled. When I told Dad I couldn't face starting a new school he said he'd teach me maths and the sciences and get me tutors for English and History and that. He didn't because I couldn't face it yet.

I couldn't believe Mum was gone, that I'd never see her again, and neither could Dad. You see people dying on TV every night but you don't expect your mother to die when you're just my age. You don't expect her to be murdered. You just don't expect it. Even when you first know it's happened you can't imagine what it's going to be like to live without her and how you'll feel. Nothing you've ever, read in a book, been taught in school or seen on telly tells you that. Even before we started moving I think I grew away from friends because I couldn't explain and they couldn't understand. You see this is not like your granny dying. You expect your granny to die. No one expects this. It's too big for most people to even imagine. Night after night there are murders in Detective shows and they don't show how painful it is. They don't show what is left behind.

Dad couldn't face doing the shopping, without mum, because they had always done it together. Mum had really always taken charge and stopped Dad buying daft things. He'd sometimes go round the store looking for the things with the most E numbers and highest sugar content and put them in the trolley just to get a response from her. Dad can have that type of sense of humour, except when he gets very depressed, which he has been a lot since Mum died.

He gets very down sometimes and thinks that something terrible is going to happen. The funny thing is that the first sign of him being depressed is often that when he's watching something funny on telly and his laugh is higher pitched than normal and he laughs too loud or for too long. It is like he is trying too hard to be happy. It's like he's trying to cling on.

So because Dad couldn't bear to go to the supermarket with Mum we got onto the idea of doing the shopping online. Every few weeks we do an order from Tesco online. We're not Jamie Oliver freaks but the food we order is ok; mainly stuff that can go in the microwave, because it is easier to cook. Mum used to make proper curries or pastas but neither of us could ever cook like her. Well Dad can cook, pretty well. He just doesn't have the heart these days.

Dad has taught me about coins, over the past year or so. He said the best thing to do was buy collections, sold after someone had died. That is because the people who sold them normally wouldn't be collectors and wouldn't know which ones were valuable. Dad showed me how to assess a coin's condition. He said I needed to know all this, just in case. I asked "Just in case of what?" and all he'd say was that it was a survival skill for when all else failed. I thought he meant if I didn't get any GCSEs. But that made no sense because he kept telling me how clever I was.

Dad keeps telling me that it would be possible to make a living buying big collections and selling coins by themselves or in small collections. He said if I ever needed to, should the worst come to the worst, I could start trading using his collection. There was more to learn than you'd think; but it all boils down to a coin's value is made up of how rare it is and how good a condition it is in. In order to train me Dad kept getting me to look at coins, under a magnifying glass, to assess their condition, and then looking them up, in his coin books, to decide their value. I was pig sick with it all because I was able to do it in my sleep and tried telling him that I didn't want to be a coin dealer but he still made me do it. He kept me at it until he decided I was good at it, and then he let me start selling some of them on eBay. At the time, I didn't know why he was making such a fuss. But he was pleased with what I was doing, especially when he saw that I was good at spotting what to buy. So that's how I got to use his credit card and bank account.

A few weeks ago Dad asked me if I'd be OK if he went away for a while. I told him of course I would; I wasn't a baby. In the First World War boys as young as me lied about their age and signed up to fight in the trenches. He said there was plenty of money in the account and all the bills were on direct debits and his pension, which is paid in, would cover them but that I should continue to buy and sell coins. I asked him where he was going but he just said he needed some time by himself for a rest and reflection. He seemed very sad and I thought maybe a holiday would help him. When he said all this it just seemed normal. I was excited by the idea that I was going to be left by myself. I felt grown up and knew that I would be responsible.

I haven't heard from Dad since he went. I have no idea where he is. I hope he's OK. The strange thing is that he has taken nothing from the bank account. I keep checking. I don't mind being here alone; I just wish I knew where he was. The thing is that if I contact the police I'm afraid they'll have me put into care. I wouldn't last five minutes somewhere like that. They'd see the glasses and as soon as I opened my mouth I'd be mincemeat. Anyway Dad hasn't disappeared; he told me he was going away. He told me he might not be in contact for a while.

I am making a list of all the things I want to ask Dad when he gets back. What is the evolutionary advantage in the Map butterfly being red and white in spring and black and white in summer? I bet that question will puzzle him. Questions like that are the only things that have lifted his mood recently. Dad's fascinated by evolution. He made me read the Blind Watchmaker when I was only thirteen. I'm glad he did. I didn't understand it all but it helped me to understand how the world has developed. Dad has always believed in challenging me. He'll really like the butterfly question. I have an explanation that might even make him laugh. Dad's from Northumberland and I might say that it's Maccems evolving into Geordies. Since he still likes to see Newcastle do well, in spite of the historic evidence, he'll say that was the right way round. Maccems should evolve into Geordies. That idea will make him laugh. I'm sure it will.

I wonder if that is where he is. He might be back up in the North -East. He once told me that there are two Buddhist monasteries in Northumberland. That idea surprised me at the time, but he insisted it is true. Maybe he's gone up there for some peace and quiet. That would explain why he hasn't contacted me and that's why he has not taken any money from his bank account. . You probably aren't able to use a mobile phone in a place like that, in case you disturb the meditating monks. Dad isn't religious, not at all, but he had found some research that meditation could be good for the mind. I wonder if he's shaved his head. It would be really weird. I can't imagine what he'd look like. He might have those robes on.

I've checked on the internet. There are two Buddhist monasteries in Northumberland. There is a Zen one at Throssle Hole and a Theravadan one at Harnham. Zen means relaxed and not worrying about things that you cannot change: Theravadan means the School of Elders I'm not sure what the difference in what they do is. They both have phone numbers and email addresses. I don't know if he is in either of them. I can't picture him being there. I just don't see why he hasn't contacted me. It makes no sense.

I ring the Zen Monastery and ask if Dad is there. The Voice on the end of the phone seems distant and tells me Dad isn't there. When he hears how worried I am he sounds kind and says I should talk to the police and hopes things work out for me. When I put the phone down I know now that Dad is like a 1959 penny. I can't be absolutely certain if he exists or not.