An old obsession.

I've probably just had the busiest weekend at home in over five years :D. It was one of those things that I'd almost forgotten about myself, the fact that I happen to collect coins. Well, not quite forgotten, more like pushed it to the back of my mind and buried it under tons of other things/people/secrets/places/thoughts for so long that it's barely a conscious thing any more.

But a fifteen year old habit dies hard, so I automatically set aside any coin that looks even vaguely unfamiliar. And I still flip every coin I handle to check if it's a commemorative piece :P. But I have never actually done a comprehensive inventory of all my coins. And I can't even remember when was the last time I organised them in any proper way. So that's what I set out to do Friday night, and it's only now that I've finally finished! Turns out I have a little over a hundred different (non-Indian) coins from 31 countries, two of which have since ceased to exist. I actually have coins from every continent except South America (now I'm really dying for that Colombian job :-<). And of course, for the nth time I realised that Google and Wiki together combine the entire wisdom of the universe in the most accessible package possible :D. Thing is, I'd not gone through my coins in such a long time that I ended up staring at a few coins with no markings on them in any script that I understand, with absolutely no idea what countries they were from! In the bargain, I actually managed to figure out how to read Arabic numerals!! :D (And I still remember what 1, 2, 3, 5 and 0 look like!! :P) Trying to figure out how to organize my Indian coins was the more fun thing though! Especially with coins dating back to the reign of Queen Victoria (which looks exactly like the pic above, except that mine is dated 1897) and every British monarch since then, except Edward VIII, but then no coins were minted during his reign anyway. The history of Indian coinage is like a wilderness! But while trying to pick my way through it, I was back in a different time and place :). A time of summer holidays and homework left undone. A place were winters were spent under mountains of quilts and blankets...

Feeling: accomplished :D
Listening to: Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Is it any wonder