Ian McMillan: Pennies from heaven to pick from the pavement

He looked like a bloke gathering cockles on a beach or somebody harvesting a root vegetable from a field; he also executed a kind of double hand movement because he was picking with one hand and holding his cap on with the other, because there's nothing worse than dropping something as you pick something up. It's like boiling the kettle and forgetting to put the teabag in the cup.

And what was he picking? Well, he was scooping up shrapnel or

retrieving brown soap. In other words, he was gathering some change from the floor.

Maybe it was a two pence piece or a penny. Or maybe he was lucky and it was a 50p piece or even (whisper it, in case it turns out to be a fake or just a bit of shiny cardboard) a pound coin, shining like the Moon.

It's a generational thing, this hoovering up the bounty of the sidewalk. You don't often see young people swooping on a coin; in fact, you're more likely to see them scattering the dosh like they're distributing seed for the birds because they don't want the bulky money to spoil the cut of their fashionable clothes.

In the background, as they scatter, a number of people my age and above can be seen licking their lips and flexing their fingers for the copper dash.

I guess you can put it down to the fact that a lot of these older people have gone through hard times and the idea of even throwing a penny away is total anathema to them.

I've not really gone through the hard times but I always pick up the cash, presumably for when the hard times come, or perhaps because I believe

in the old adage about "see a penny, pick it up and all the day you'll have good luck".

Years ago, I saw two blokes in their fifties tumbling from a working men's club late on a Saturday night. They wore suits that had fitted them once, for about two minutes when they bought them and sucked their bellies in in front of the full-length mirror in the shop. Now the suits didn't fit and the blokes were having a fight in the club yard, and their suits were flapping like mainsails in a Force 9.

They'd had a few pints and their fight wasn't that well choreographed; imagine Mr Blobby against The Michelin Man and you'll have some idea of the spectacle.

There was a subtext to the bout, though, which was that neither of them wanted to lose any of their hard-earned money.

So the first man would swing at the second man and he wouldn't connect with anything, but the force of the swing would send the loose change flying from his jacket pocket in a clattering shower.

The fight would stop, temporarily, as they both bent to pick up the coins. Then the second man would swing and the same thing would happen: the misdirected left hook, the spray of change, the gathering of the change, the placing of the change in the pocket. After a while, I got bored and moved on, but maybe they're still there, swinging and picking up.

Sunday mornings are a good time for hunter-gatherers of coins of the realm like me. Saturday nights are the times when people wester home and pull their phones or keys out of their pocket and they never hear the clatter of money on the floor, or, if they do, they just don't care. On a walk to the paper shop, I can almost make the price of the paper or at least enough for a set of World Cup stickers for Thomas.

The greatest windfall I ever saw was on a weekday though, and it was just that: a windfall.

I was in a taxi very early in the morning heading to Sheffield station. The sky had the blue freshness of

early summer, and there was nobody about on the 5am streets. Suddenly

my mate, Keith, the taxi driver, slammed on the brakes and leaped from the car.

"I won't be a minute!" he said.

I thought he was ill but he jumped back into the driver's seat waving a 10 note in the manner of Chamberlain coming back from Munich. He'd seen it floating, autumn leaf-like, from the sky.

We looked around and we couldn't see anybody looking distressed so he trousered it like a banker pocketing a bonus.

There was a moment of silence in the taxi because we couldn't quite believe what had just happened: money only falls from the sky in films or fairy tales, doesn't it?

Then we whooped and high-fived because it was real and most of the time life takes money away from you, and so it's time to celebrate when you get some back.

Ten quid – that's nearly three years of good luck on the penny principle...