Real money, pounds, shillings and pence, fair enough. But once we went decimal there's no point in fussing around with a different metric currency from all our neighbours.

It's as if we'd gone over to having ten new inches to the foot.

Now the pound weight, together with ounces and stones, those might be worth defending, because they are measures with some conveniences to set against the complications of the Harry Potter type numbers - but the pound as a unit of currency, that's just an arbitrary nuisance which makes it easier to get away with keeping prices for all kinds of things higher here than in other parts of Europe.