Pounds, shillings & pence were a great test of mental arithmetic and reckoning up, I’ll stick my neck out here and say that us fossils who were used to the different mixed denominations, 240d to the £, 12d to a shilling etc are better at maths mentally due to this. Strange how 50 years have gone by yet I still say 30 bob rather than the boring One Pound Fifty. Reading about old coins the other day and was surprised to find out that a tanner was previously nicknamed a bender, due to the high silver content it was easy to bend. In the 19th century it was easy to go out and get pissed on 2d, so with 6d you could get hammered, hence the term ‘going on a bender’.