Found a tin in the shed? Good. Don't clean it.

A note from Bev

On cleaning

Please don't clean them. I know the urge, because I had it myself the first time I tipped my nan's penny tin out onto her kitchen table in Prospect, and every one of them was brown and a bit sticky and smelled faintly of the shed. There was one bright penny in that tin, gleaming like a new button, and I thought it was the pick of the lot until an old collector at the next table at my first fair turned it over and told me, very gently, that somebody had scrubbed it with bicarb and it was now worth about a tenth of the dull ones sitting beside it. Silver tones the way a cup of tea left on the bench goes dark at the edges, slowly and evenly, and that colour is part of the coin's story and part of its price, and once it's gone nobody can put it back. A soft toothbrush is still too hard. A cloth is too hard. Even your thumb, rubbed over and over, will wear the high points of a portrait flat. If a coin is filthy, leave it filthy, pop it in a paper envelope, and bring it to the table, and we'll look at it together under the lamp. I would much rather see a coin with forty years of pocket on it, every scratch from every bus fare and tuck shop, than a shiny one that has had its whole life polished out of it, and I suspect if you sit with us for twenty minutes you'll end up feeling the same way, which is usually about when the kettle goes on again.

Bev