Buying sweets with a handful of coppers was a joy of my childhood. Is it goodbye to 1ps and 2ps? | Coco Khan

The Treasury says it won’t mint new coins this year – causing great nostalgia, and a mass emptying out of old handbags

What are your strongest memories of the 1p coin, and its bigger cousin, the 2p piece? For me it’s childhood, and carrying fists full of coppers to the corner shop where the shopkeeper would let me make my own 20p bag of pick ’n’ mix known as a “mix up”. “Sherbet straws are 5p, not a penny,” he would remind me (an early lesson in budgeting), because straws were my fave. Those and the chocolate “cigarettes”: sticks of chocolate covered in rice paper, fished out from fake fag packs and held between our index and middle fingers as we nibbled – pretending we were taking puffs. If we couldn’t afford a pack of chocolate ciggies, he would let us buy one for the mix up for 3p, a mark up on their 2p in-box value simply because he could (an early lesson on capitalism).

For clarity, these memories of children play-smoking for pennies are from the late 1990s, not the 50s – which, I admit, is how they sound. Chances are your 1p and 2p memories sound as if they are from another era too, and soon they could be.

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