Ranking All the New 10p Coins, From Best to Worst

Here's the new thing the Royal Mint and the Post Office have come up with to keep your dad busy over summer: they've released 26 new 10p coins, ostensibly as collectible items but truly for reasons unknown. "This is my pension, son!" your dad is saying, sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of £100 worth of assorted glimmering 10 pence coins. "This is your inheritance!" (In this scenario you are your dad’s son, or your dad never accepted that you were not a son – he wanted a son, desperately, a miniature version of him to watch football and Top Gear with – and never really related to you coming out as anything other than a son, and so occasionally slips and calls you "son" anyway, like Noel Edmonds howling into the universe and hoping it will actualise his wishes if he speaks his hidden truth). "Son, look!" he says. "This one has James Bond on it!" He’s never been happier, has he, the pathetic little worm.

Anyway, all the 10 pence coins are about Britain, somehow, or being British. There’s our exquisite cuisine (chips) and our, uh, extremely basic infrastructure (zebra crossings?). There’s one that just has cricket on it. A double decker bus. The concept of queuing. Actually – laid out, end-to-end, in alphabetical order or not, the coins paint a deeply depressing picture of British culture or the lack thereof. We basically just like tea and hierarchy, don’t we? What an absolute fucking mess of a country.

I’ll stop messing around now. We all know what we’re here for. HERE ARE THE NEW TEN PENCE PIECES, RANKED:

BEST

I’m ranking these across two metrics: how good is the thing represented by the coin? And: how good is the artistic rendering of the aforementioned thing on the coin? And for both reasons here, English Breakfast comes out on top. Firstly, English Breakfasts are absolute A+ sick, don’t even pretend (the beauty of the English Breakfast is its un-beauty: it is a monstrous amount of meat, divided by a swathe of beans, essentially inedible on anything other than a massive hangover, and even the greatest chef on the planet could not make an elegant version of one), plus I absolutely want a 10p coin with a massive fry-up on it. It’s actually absurd that our real, minted money doesn’t already have this on it. Congealed blood formed into a sausage is our only true culture.

This is good because it’s the only thing exclusively about Scotland on the list, but it’s also not real, is it. The Loch Ness Monster is not a real thing. So essentially what this coin is saying is, "Yes, Scotland, we see you and recognise you as part of Britain. But not enough that your actual cultural artefacts get to be featured on a 10 pence piece. No Irn-Bru pennies for you." And what a bodying that is.

You’re eight years old and stood barefoot in the grey–yellow sand of a quiet British beach. The sea lulls lazily in the distance, a hundred miles away. The tide went out the second your dad pulled into the carpark and won’t be in for another nine hours, when it will be home-time. And you could crawl over there to it, couldn’t you – a 20 minute walk, picking yourself through clods of seaweed and unturned razor shells, dip your toes in the frigid North Sea – but you’re not going to. You’re going to stand here, slathered in Factor 50 that seems redundant as the sun isn’t out and the sky is grey above you, and you’re going to dig a big hole.

Your mum: sat in a deckchair doing her crosswords. Your dad: asleep on a big towel. Perhaps you have a brother or sister who keeps trying to make sandcastles with the wet, sloppy sand. Is this good? Are you… having a good time? Some of your friends from school went to Spain this summer, and all you got was four days in Filey. Wind whips sand into your face. Later, you will fall asleep, exhausted, in the fold-down bunk of a caravan. Is this… good? Is this… what holidays are? Your mum is whispering your name. "Hey," she says, holding up a shiny one pound coin. "Hey. Psst. Go get yourself an ice cream." Double cone, double flake. Eat it all to yourself with the white smudging your face. A ten pence piece could never capture the joy.

It’s just good to have a statue that isn’t of someone really racist or good at war isn’t it.

This is a good one because it will be almost entirely defunct in the next couple of years, and then we can wistfully turn these celebratory coins over in our hands and remember the good old days when, if we got ill or shot, we didn’t go bankrupt, and be like, "That was good, wasn’t it—" bleeding from slashes in our faces or necks, vomiting dark blood from a horrid low place within ourselves "—that was good when healthcare was free at the point of use," and then we will count out all our 10p pieces and hand them over, shivering, to a stern-faced nurse-type who works on behalf of some Tory backer-owned healthcare startup, and they will give us a pill we can take that will kill us.

Great bunch of lads, the Stonehenge rocks, and most crucially they offer blokes called "Spider" somewhere to go and get high and do fire blowing that isn’t that bench outside your town’s branch of Poundland.

On one level I truly think enjoying tea in the hyperbolic and near-fetishistic way we do is the most boring facet of our national identity – oh yes, nice cup of tea; shall we have a cup of tea; tea fixes everything, doesn’t it – but when you see some of the shit that’s yet to come, sadly this engraved image of a steaming teapot is in fact one of the better coins in the collection, if you can imagine such a thing. I still maintain that "ooh, tea!" people should be shot and killed for the national benefit, but until this country is under my iron law it won’t happen, will it. Tea is fine but let’s not suck its dick too much.

Ah, you’re eight years old again, I’m afraid, and it’s one of those pregnantly sweaty summer days, and you've spent all of it outside, playing, the sweat sticking to your brow and, in turn, the dry dust of the desiccated fields beneath you wicking to it, so you’re hot and dirty and joyous and exhausted, and slowly the sky goes from bright to grey above you and starts to rumble ­– it’s been days since rain, hasn’t it; weeks, it seems – and then that first big drop of it hits you, salty and cold, followed by ten more, and then it’s pelting down, suddenly, and the clouds look purple above you as you sprint home with your arms crossed futile over your head, and when you arrive home your mum rubs your hair with a towel and you sit cross-legged by the TV with that skittering sound of rain on the windows, and your dad’s car pulls up outside the house and someone says, "Ah, dinner’s here," and then you are handed it to unwrap like a jewel: a hot, heavy package of paper, and inside it, vinegar-y chips and a pale hunk of battered cod, buttered bread, heaven on earth.

Anyway, fish and chips are boss, but the design is a bit mad on this one – like: why does it have a visible skeleton? Keep goths out of coin design, 2K18 – which is why it ranks so relatively low.

Fair play to whoever at the Royal Mint was stuck with the exercise of thinking of 26 British things according to the letters of the alphabet, really. 'What do British people like? Hmm: they do really like crossing a mildly busy road while making eye contact with the drivers either side of them to make sure they’re actually going to slow down enough to let them cross. Let’s make a coin of that.'

I contend that a 10p coin that celebrates "the concept of time" with this illustration is possibly one of the most mediocre and boring things ever conceived of, and I absolutely will not be collecting it as such.

Cuck

'What do British people like? Facelessly sitting on a stacked-up bus, joylessly commuting home from work, silently getting mad at the same person drunkenly eating a McDonald’s across the front two seats' – someone at Royal Mint, apparently.

'What do British people like? Wearing a hardy coat and being rained on so they finally have something to fucking talk about' – someone at Royal Mint, apparently.

'What do British people like? Idk… birds? What’s a bird? [sends office-all e-mail] can anyone think of a bird?' – &c. &c. &c.

The thing is, when you get up close to a good oak tree – ancient, magnificent, wise and huge, exuding a sort of earthy, healthy smell, put your ear up to the trunk and swear you can feel a creaking, distant sort of heartbeat, thu–dum thu–dum – it’s near-breathtakingly awesome and beautiful, but also sometimes you see a photo of one and you’re like: I could give or take this tree. I am finding it very hard to be horny for this tree right now. And what I am saying is this coin of an O with a leaf wrapped around it doesn’t make me feel much of anything, sorry.

Yeoman are those little Tower of London lads with the sort of red tunic bullshit going on, who pose for photos with tourists and have little grey beards, and I honestly think if we’re talking about icons of British modern life we’d be better off celebrating, like, Deliveroo riders, or smelting the face of Ant and Dec onto a 10p.

Ah yes, politicians. Let's honour them with a coin while they steer us out of Europe and lop off all access to housing and salt the earth where public funding once was and spend expense money on duck houses and escorts, cheers a lot.

The Queen is already on every single coin and every single note, so quite why she needs a 10p celebrating that time she was Queen for so long we gave her a massive nationwide party I don’t really know. But, to be fair, there aren’t many "J" things in this country to be proud of, are there. "Jam"? I'd have a 10p with a jam jar on it, actually. Mary Berry in the background, chomping the whole thing monstrously down in one. I’d absolutely collect that. Why was I not consulted when this was going on.

Only thing more Brexit than putting cricket on a collectible 10p coin is putting a Union Flag on a 10p coin tbqh.

[DRAKE MEME W/ FACE SHUNNING AWAY] Putting a post box on a 10p piece to celebrate Royal Mail and the postal system in general
[DRAKE MEME W/ GLEEFULLY PEACEFUL FACE] Putting a post box with four rough boys on BMXs pouring petrol into it ahead of destroying an entire column of Christmas cards to celebrate anarchy

Nobody calls it the "web" anymore because it’s not 1998 and also it was invented in Switzerland, and YES I am FULLY AWARE I sound like the almost visibly virginal lad at your uni halls first-year flat-wide party ("Axis of Awesome are actually very good, here’s a 40-minute monologue as to why, which will precede me going home and looking at every single photo of you on Facebook, every single one" – me) but come on, man, this is LAZY COIN-MAKING

Proper "running out of shit to think of that can go on a coin", here. Suppose it’s quite difficult to illustrate the concept of xenophobia in such a small coin-sized space.

There’s nothing more British than a <10,000 population settlement a 30-minute drive from everywhere where they petitioned against opening a Pizza Express, only get broadband one day a week and everyone for some reason is on the council.

Your dad, in the kitchen, thick roll of 10p pieces he changed a tenner for down at the newsagent, finally holding this aloft to the glinting sun, yelling a single, clear word: "NIIIIIIIIIIIGEEEEELLLLLLLLLLL!"

Figured out why Bond is popular, and that is he’s basically porn for blokes over the age of 45 who can’t, actually, figure out how to access porn on their laptop without the sound going off and waking everyone in the house up. "He’s doing parkour on a rooftop, look!" your uncle is saying. "Look at that car!" Mentally, he is exactly as stimulated as he would be by footage of a rough, British gang-bang: he just doesn’t realise it. "Man’s man, Bond is," he says, holding his special horny 10p up. "If they cast Idris Elba as him I’m driving the Audi off a bridge."

WORST

This is it, isn’t it; this is the worst one: we, Britons, when sliced up and analysed and spun for particles, this is what tiny grains of culture come out: that we enjoy the rigid unspoken rules of the queue, that we respect the queue above everything else, that we are baffled to the point of annoyance by Pret’s two-queue system, that we love and simultaneously hate nothing more than when someone pushes in a queue ahead of us (hate: that someone has pushed in; love: that we get to say "excuse me!" at them), we spend our lives in queues, we have – all of us – at some point been in a queue that hasn’t been moving and only, 20 minutes later, realised that the queue has no authority, that we are just queuing behind some person, that we never thought to check whether the queue had meaning.

This is us, this is all we have. The country is thousands of years old. We stamped 10ps out to celebrate everything we are. And the main, main thing is: put a man quietly outside a closed shop one time and I, a British person, will stand politely behind him. We’re an absolutely awful nation and have to be put to an end.

@joelgolby