What would happen to our currency if the UK abolished the monarchy?
Let's not splinter our rectums by sitting on the fence; I am against the existence of the monarchy. I find the arguments employed in justifying the monarchy are just that- arguments. And I don't want to argue (You do? - shit). Well, I just don't want to be ruled by a family so inbred that their family tree resembles a stump.
The monarchy, apparently, is a valuable tourist attraction: a fulcrum for those Europeans, Japanese and Americans who are so starved of tacky chintz in their native modernist environments, bereft of the comfort of the gaudy. Paris attracts tourists in the millions, and no history lesson I'm sure is needed to outline that the monarchical history of France has ceased to be a going concern for a fair while now. The tourist revenue generating monarchy arguments hold no water. As if Arthur and Martha in Iowa are saying, "Gee, ah don't wanna holidaay in a country that don't have no constitutional moanarchy, ah mit git them AIDS disease."
The problems of abolishing the monarchy are not those of tradition, history, inbred atavism, or a resulting thinning of sunday supplements. Instead, they are macroscopically logistic - what will happen to our stamps and our banknotes? Hell, stamp collectors would be in business- the price would triple overnight (I've got a 2009 second class stamp - its got the queen on!- hear the future cry of of lamborgihni-owning philatelists).
I've never been one for stamp collecting myself, but neither would I hold that all stamp collectors are forty year old single men whose most exciting sexual experience was wanking into their elder sister's tights. However, most of us like to accumulate huge WADS of banknotes. Personally, though, I'm a little bored of having the prim, then virginal queen staring benignly back at me (though these days, I'm always reminded of the scene in Peep Show where Jeremy, on a visit to a sperm bank, has to expend one over the queen, in lieu of actual porn). But take out your wallet, go be rolling out that foldin' money. They all have the queen on! It's booorrriiinnggg. Males of an age before the internet may be reminded of collecting Panini (before it became a heated sandwich for tossers) football stickers. Completism was the name of the game. You had to last the full ninety minutes. But in every single pack, there was always one sticker that was Les Ferdinand, or some hack midfielder for Sheffield Wednesday whose name escapes memory, and probably history, too.
So, in our little hypothetical utopia, where the only issue of concern is what to print on our banknotes, how should the wise and well-endowed children of the revolution resolve this nagging issue? How do we go from this -
I turn for inspiration, like most rationally-minded people in times of great and trying practical difficulty, to the zany world of cultish Brit sitcoms, in this instance, the great, the wonderful.... Bottom.
For the criminally uninitiated, Bottom was a mildly successful British sitcom concerning the desperate attempts of two Hammersmith-dwelling saddos called Richard Richard and Eddie Hitler to get laid, and, in essence, not to be, two Hammersmith-dwelling saddos called Richard Richard and Eddie Hitler. In one episode, Eddie Hitler attempts to ameliorate their flyover-poverty by forging money. Competency and sobriety not being part of Eddie's armoury, he cleverly circumvents this by printing obscene banknotes (one such tableau depicting Sylvester Stallone fisting Mr McInnery from the Magic Roundabout), in an attempt to dazzle barmen and shop assistants in the locale in the hope that 'they don't recognise how crap the squiggly lines are'. What a brilliant idea...Forgive the soiling of my impeccable, republican left-leaning credentials, but I believe that male boggle-eyed lechery will continue into any future socialist utopia. And to assuage the depraved urges of the filthy (yet noble) proles, I would venture for Miss UK to be the face (and rather more besides) of our currency. Yes, have Miss UK, on our banknotes, in incrementally advancing states of undress according to the appreciating value of the banknote. On the fiver, she wears a nice dress, maybe a little taut around the hips and cleavage. Onto the tenner, she's clad in a bikini; on the twenty, she's naked, except for the sucking on a lollipop and a strategically placed copy of the Racing Post. And, boy, if you get a fifty, you're not even going to be wanting to spend that. Brothers, sisters, lets get rid of the monarchy, so we can have revolutionary pornographic banknotes. Let's give filthy lucre a truer and better name.
