We were reading about the beginning of WWII in Nicholas' history book, when a sentence about "the falling value of the Mark" raised a question about what, or who even, Mark was. So we got out a little box with random (old!) coins left over from our various travels of years ago, to look at the coins European countries used to use before the Euro - so familiar to me, and so totally unknown to my children.
Ten years since I began to use the Euro, I still say "it's not even worth 2 Lira", when I refer to something of no value at all, and I now wonder what my kids make of it. Those pre-Euro coins were pretty, with so much symbolism from the agricultural and natural world - the olive branch on French francs, a plough and a head of wheat on the humble 10 Lira, the salmon on the Irish flóirín ...
