English idiosyncracies that fascinate my Canadian brain

While I was waiting for my recent travel photos and blog post to upload, I began idly sorting a pile of British coins into a tower by size.

As a North American, I'm accustomed to this coin size progression, from large to small:
Two dollar, one dollar, fifty cent piece (rarely seen), quarter or twenty-five cents, nickel or five cents, penny, and dime or ten cents. Don't ask me why the dime is smaller than the penny or the nickel, but Canadians and Americans both do it that way.

Considering that Canada and the US were once British colonies, I would have assumed that our coinage stacked up comparatively. Obviously it doesn't, since I am writing here.

My little stack of English coins, from largest to smallest, is as follows: Two pound (which looks suspiciously like a loonie, but we started minting them a year earlier, so ha!), fifty pence (an odd seven sided thing), two pence (like two pennies, only really big), ten pence (the size of a Canadian quarter), twenty pence (also seven sided), one pound (twice as thick as any of the others), and one penny.

For those of you unfamiliar with British pound, one pound is 100 pence. One British pound, in the current market, is worth about $2.20 Canadian.

But let's get back to the silly arrangement of size. How can a one pound coin, the second most valuable coin in circulation, be so small? And heavy, for that matter. If you think a handful of loonies and toonies weigh you down, try these suckers! I really don't get the two pence coin, either. Why two? Most other systems use multiples of five or ten. Makes sense to me, but the British are big on tradition.

If a certain monarch decided that something needed to happen a certain way, then I guess that is how it will go, from here unto eternity. If you want to know the exceedingly tedious details of how each coin came to be, check out the link I've included.

If you are a serious coin collector, then I suppose all this history might be interesting. For me, the most interesting part will be the destruction of my tower. I will then go to the corner store and buy beer with it, crack it open and drink it while walking down the street. Why? Because in London, I can.