Chris Perkins

And down south you can wander between Kent, Sussex and Surrey and be astounded by the miriad of local differences!

No! They have long since had an independent government and full control over their own currency. I do know though that French Guyana, nextdoor to Brazil I believe had to also adopt the Euro.

I have a Spectrum Emulator for the PC somewhere, and a program that slows your PC down so it runs Speccy stuff at the original speed. Even last year when I got hold of a copy of the original Elite, it still kept me busy for hours (once I'd re learn't what all the keys do). A superb game combining arcade shoot 'em up and commerce skills, but the most amazing thing was the size of the 'world'. You could visit countless planets and there always seemed like there were thousands more (all contained in 48k of memory, tiny even in comparison to a floppy disc)! But....the most difficult thing wasn't the space pirates, it was landing the bloody thing in the hexagonal post box!!

I had a Speccy +3 which had a disc drive!!! Super quick games loads, just as quick as a modern PC. I got quite good at hacking the tape games and dumping the code onto 3" disc so that in the end I had 20 games on an Amstrad 3" floppy. Do you remember Elite? Now that was an amazing game, far far ahead of it's time.

The only way would be for eBay to check each listing before it gets added. But they don't give a toffee flea (now there's an interesting expression that hasn't slipped out in ages!) judging by their rubbish communication with users and the fact there is no phone number shown. Ebay is one massive automated money making machine, and as long as you're paying the fees you can almost get away with anything.

I loved Spectrums, used to like to programme them in BASIC. I even wrote a programme for a maths project once to enable me to generate random numbers within a certain range and study the statistics of the resulting numbers. I got top marks for that.

Yes but without the young people scampering for the latest things, we'd be an email group and not a forum, and we'd all be using Sinclair Spectrums with 16 colours and a modem the size and speed of a tortoise!

Yes, I run IE7 now and have noticed the Firefox features that have been added! I'd use Firefox too, but it really is not stable on my system for some reason.

I used Firefox for a little while last year to try out, but I had big problems with it. Every 20 seconds of so it would freeze and not respond for about 10 seconds.

It's because he put a URL to the picture in the message instead of using the forum add file software.

Yes, that was him!

The old owner of Rotographic used to sell some books to a coin shop in Canterbury, but when I took over I was unable to establish any contact, so I'm afraid I don't know of any.

I check emails in the morning usually and it is awful. Once I had 75 new messages, all spam except 2 of them! They only do it because it's easy and anonymous even if they generate very little business, it doesn't really matter because you can send the same message to millions of email addresses and then move on to the next. I think it's such a world problem that diplomatic pressure should be put on countries like Russia, China, Korea etc to make it more difficult for the people there doing the vast majority of it.

They certainly don't in Korea, which is part of Eastern Spamland.

The spam has really been getting on my *$*s lately! The more visitors a forum has, the more it is targeted by spam bots. And the predecimal forum is regularly indexed by Google, hence the attempts by spammers to list their rubbish and also get that indexed by Google. On Christmas day I thought the spam might be quieter, but no, there were 6 auto posted messages containing various ellicit links originating from various foreign countries! It's a help having scottishmoney to delete things, but what I've done lately is make the 'Enquiries about British coins' area (the most spammed area of late) an approval only forum. That means that when you post a new topic in there it won't be visible until I OK it. Within an hour there are already 2 spam messages waiting in the queue!

True, but there are many amateur collectors (and also more experienced ones) that overgrade coins because they feel they deserve to be a little bit better somehow! Or perhaps they paid too much and they want to justify the price. Overall though, you're quite right. Once a colector is confident in his field, he alone should be the judge, jury and collection executioner!

There are some nice Russians out there, I've come across a few. But there does seem to be a ridiculously large number of bloody thieves in your vast and contrasting land (not just there though, there are also huge criminal populaces in lots of other countries). And, Russia also houses most of the servers where the majority of the worlds spam email and forum post seem to come from too! Perhaps the above posted translated Ekaterina as Elizabeth :S

By the way I think Josie misunderstood the above list. I am not involved with the coin grading venture and I don't believe any of those other dealers are either. Some big names though, nice of you to include little old me among them Goodheart!

I have a house in Gillingham. Is the new bridge done across to Sheppey yet? I heard they were going to build another one that didn't need to open up and strand the islanders when big ships went by! Can you read anything on the coin?

Be careful about this one chaps, whatever it is! Russians don't have a splendidly honest reputation in the world today. Especially those that don't register first, or post any pictures and have a hotmail email address (in Germany)! Please do come back and verify yourself if I have dissed you.

Do you mean the I of DEI, and not the D of DEI? So there are 4 types of 1970 proof halfpenny? 1. 495A 21.5mm ship. 2. As above with wider rim/DEI 'I' to bead. 3. 495B 21.7mm ship. 4. As above with wider rim/DEI 'I' to bead. Or it that wrong??

This is something interesting for the next CCGB. Let me clarify it first. In Freeman 2 reverse types are noted, I and K. This is not another identifying sign of the same variety? This coin: http://www.predecimal.com/forsale/10/halfpenny1970.jpg Does seem to have a thicker obverse rim, but the reverse rim isn't all that different. Is this 'normal' i.e thinner rim evident on both sides? I've just noticed that the I in DEI appears to either point to or between beads in the 2 images posted! Unfortunately I don't have any 1970 proof halfpennies to study....Can everyone check the pointing of the I in DEI??

And the reason they're not included in Freeman is because they're copper (in the main) not bronze.

I beat the banker and won £35,000! Do we collect the money from you Peter?

Actually with 'nudge machines' I meant those cascade machines where you put one coin in and have a tiny chance of getting more than one out as the coins are shoved towards you.