NOTES:
I first got the idea for this story (or as it turned out, collection of them) from Roald Dahl's autobiographical "Boy", in which he gets caned for breaking the nib of his pen and not completing an essay on the life story of a penny. I'm sure if I'd written this when I read that book (a good fifteen years ago now) it wouldn't have been anything like this. It wasn't planned that my coin would end passing through the hands of so many unsavoury characters, but then, they're generally the more interesting ones. Back in Dahl's day I'm sure a penny was worth more than it is today, and would be more likely to be spent than it is today, rather than thrown on the floor, so I decided to write it about a pound coin, which is perhaps the key unit of British currency. Though as Mike Stone pointed out, if he wrote this story about a pound coin, it would be very short: it would spend the entire day in his pocket. So I've had to contrive it that this coin is spent regularly just to keep it moving, which explains the inordinate number of characters who are sales assistants.

Not all of these stories (especially those near the beginning) are particularly developed. Indeed, a lot of them are only a few hundred words long. This was more an exercise in keeping the creative juices flowing after finishing my "Doctor Who" story and before starting on my next major project. Whilst it's not written in a stream of consciousness style, it's certainly stream of consciousness plotting. I came up with a character, got the coin into their hands, and then just went with it. Sometimes it didn't work out, and I got the coin out of their hands again as swiftly as possible, but there are several vignettes here that have inspired other, more developed ideas I may get around to (re)writing at some point.