50p coin

This afternoon I came in from work to find my dad looking disgruntled, more so than usual. I thought that it was my floordrobe which had caused him discontent or perhaps that I had managed to break my windscreen wiper on my car for the third time this week- it turned out to be neither. It was in fact that I had not only stolen his "special" 50 pence piece from the kitchen bench but that I'd given it to my Blueline taxi driver to pay for my drunken journey home.

I initially thought that his anger was staged but he was actually outraged that in my inebriated state I had somehow managed to confuse the "special" coin for a nondescript average 50 pence piece. (Please see below for a picture of such coins).

Upon confronting him what was so special about the coin, he seemed to lack any justification in his answer, just that he wanted to keep it. I said I'd give him 50 pence to replace it but apparently it's not the same. (Except it is?) Then I thought about it, there are hundreds and thousands of these "special" coins which exchange owners everyday. Yet people feel the need to keep them, hoard them in fact, but for what reason? They're not the Princess Diana £5 that my grandma gave me when I was younger and didn't understand why my mam wouldn't let me buy a £5 mix up with. They're just coins which are worth 50p, and even if they have some pattern on them, the pattern would look awful once all the coins were collated together due to the fact that 50p pieces don't tesselate. And who wants to put loads of coins together to make a pattern anyway? Hopefully my Blueline taxi driver.