To put in a perspective understandable to many, if not most, an advertisement, possibly apocryphal,, of 18th Century London went... Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence.

Therefore, price the cheapest bottle of rotgut gin you can find. Divide its price by the number of ounces it contains. Then estimate the number of ounces it would take to get you drunk; multiply times the per ounce price and that should give you the equivalent of a penny in modern terms..

Forty pounds contains 9600 pennies which would allow you to get blind drunk slightly more than thirteen time a day every year..

I'll drink to that -- Tom