Ian McMillan: Time for change after years of sterling service

I'm in a bit of a dilemma about what to do with my money, about where to put it. What's the safest place? Where can I leave it and still have peace of mind? I need to be able to get to it instantly but I don't want to run the risk of losing it. It's keeping me awake at night, I can tell you.

Of course I'm not talking about my investments or my Swiss bank accounts; no, I'm talking about my physical rather than my virtual dosh. To be even more precise, I'm talking about coins of the realm or Belm as my old mate Arthur used to call it on the building site. "Has tha got any belm?" he'd ask as the baker's van came round each morning. He loved his egg custards, old Arthur, and he'd always left his money in the cabin. Funny, that.

My coin problem was brought into sharp and percussive relief the other morning in the paper shop on Doncaster station. I keep my change in one of those coin bags they give you in the bank for reasons I'll explain later. I pulled out the coin bag and it suddenly tore and went all ragged and fell to bits and various denominations clattered to the floor like peas on a snare drum rolling all over, dizzying The Queen.

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After I'd picked the money up and paid for my newspaper, I told the lady behind the counter about my crumbling plastic bag. She nodded: "They don't make them like they used to; in the last few months loads of mine have split and torn." I thought to myself: I'm in my mid-fifties and I've never had a conversation about plastic coin bags before. Isn't the world a multi-faceted place?

That's as maybe but it doesn't solve my financial worries. I reckon it's something that all men face: where do I keep my money?

As a lad, I just kept it in the pocket of my corduroy shorts which meant that I may as well have chucked it straight on the floor to cut out the middleman. In those days the coins were much bigger than they are now: pennies like Frisbees and two-bob bits as huge and heavy as bin lids. After what felt like a matter of minutes the sharp-edged threepenny bits would fray and chip away at the lining of my pocket and a hole would appear and the money would simply roll away. Sometimes I heard it and sometimes I didn't which would lead to terrible red-faced embarrassment when I popped in to Mrs Batty's for some Spangles and Bazooka Joes.

My mother would give me a clip round the ear and sew up the hole. In my pocket, not my ear, obviously. Eventually there was almost nothing left to sew up, there was more hole than pocket, more air than cloth, so she bought me a purse, a practical faux-leather one with a bit of a flap and a couple of compartments. She described it as a "young man's purse" which was meant to make me feel grown up. It didn't, I just felt daft.

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I know that these days I wouldn't think twice about clutching a purse but we're talking about the mid-1960's in the South Yorkshire coalfield here and, to put it bluntly, purses were for mams or aunties or grandmas or sisters. Purses weren't for lads. I looked at the purse and I almost wept.

She might as well have bought me a frock. Public humiliation beckoned when I went to buy my Spangles. Years later we had a next-door neighbour called Jim and he was a man of the world and once came back from a holiday in France with a gentleman's handbag which was like a purse to the power of ten but even in those more enlightened times people still stared and pointed on the street, so I had no chance in 1965 with my purse.

I did, by mistake, get it out one day in the playground at Low Valley Juniors. You could have cut the silence with a penknife; you could have heard the subsequent laughter in Royal Tunbridge Wells.

As I got older and more mature, I realised that in fact the purse was sensible rather than silly and nobody, even in Barnsley, laughed when I flourished it. The trouble was that it felt a bit fiddly; it felt tightfisted and miserly and I wanted to give the impression that I was generous and carefree. So it was back to the pocket. And back to the holes. And back to the money rolling away.

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And when the hole appeared in my jacket pocket that was when I turned to the coin bag, which I reasoned was a bit like a punk, devil-may-care purse. Until the other day, in the paper shop on the station.

So now I don't know what to do. Stronger pockets? Hunt out the purse? A money belt? An old sock? Change will come, as President Obama said. Change will come.