Bundles counted out, bundles counted back, cash counted against them. The stock is always right and the money is always right, and about nine times a season the money includes a coin that has not been legal tender in my lifetime.
I run a small site, thirty four pitches, and I sell firewood out of a shed with an honesty box on the wall.
I want to explain the counting, because this is a story about counting.
The wood comes in loose, seasoned hardwood, and I make it up into net bundles myself in the winter. A bundle is a fixed size because I use the same net and I fill it the same way, and I count them into the shed in stacks of twenty.
The price is four pounds and it is painted on the wall. The box is a steel cash box bolted through the shed wall with a slot in the front, and I empty it every morning.
So every morning there are two numbers. Bundles gone, and money in. Divide one by the other and you get how honest your campers are.
Mine are very honest. Across a season I am usually down by three or four bundles out of six hundred, which works out at about one per cent, and I have always thought that says something good about the kind of person who goes camping.
The two numbers agree. That is what makes this worth telling.
Nine times a season, give or take, the morning count is one bundle down and four pounds up, exactly like every other transaction.
And in the box there is a coin that should not be in circulation.
The first one was in 2016 and I thought it was a foreign coin, because that is what you think.
It is a halfpenny. Not a new halfpenny, the little one from the seventies. A pre-decimal halfpenny, a ha'penny, with a ship on the back.
Those stopped being legal tender on the 31st of July 1969. I have looked that up more times than I need to.
What is in the box on those mornings is always four pounds exactly, and the four pounds is always made up of ordinary current coins except for one.
I have a tin. There are fifty one coins in it.
Twenty three pre-decimal halfpennies, dates from 1937 to 1967. Nineteen pre-decimal pennies, the big ones. Six threepenny bits, the brass twelve sided ones. Two sixpences. One florin, 1948.
Every one of them is worn the way a coin is worn when it has been in pockets. None of them is clean or mounted or the sort of thing that comes out of a collection. They are coins that were used.
The arithmetic is the thing I cannot put down.
If somebody pays four pounds and one of the coins is a ha'penny, then they have paid three pounds ninety nine and a half.
I have weighed the cash. I started doing that in 2018 because I wanted to be sure I was not making a mistake counting in the dark at six in the morning, and a bank bag of coins weighs what it weighs.
On those mornings the cash comes to four pounds exactly, counting the old coin at its old face value.
A ha'penny is half an old penny, which is one four hundred and eightieth of a pound, and no combination of current coins plus a ha'penny makes four pounds exactly.
Unless the rest of it is old money too. And it is not. The rest of it is a pound coin and three fifties, or two pounds and four fifties, ordinary change out of an ordinary pocket, and then one coin from before I was born, and the total is four pounds.
I have taken the tin and the morning's float to my brother in law who is an accountant and watched him do it on paper twice. He said it does not reconcile and then he said it reconciles to four pounds, and then he said both of those things again, and then he asked whether I wanted another drink.
What I have checked about the campers.
I know who is on the site. Thirty four pitches and I take the bookings myself.
I have asked, on the mornings after, in the way you can ask on a small site, whether anybody had any trouble with the firewood. Nobody has ever mentioned paying with anything odd. Nobody has ever mentioned being short.
I put a camera on the shed in 2019, a battery one pointed at the box from across the yard. It has recorded perhaps four hundred people buying firewood over six years.
On three of the nights with a coin, the camera recorded nobody at the shed at all between eleven at night and six in the morning, and one bundle had gone.
On the other nights with a coin, the camera recorded somebody, and the somebody was an ordinary camper in a fleece, and I have watched four of them put their money in the slot, and I cannot see what is in their hand, because it is a slot in a box and nobody holds their change up to a camera.
The coins are spendable in the sense that the bank would take them by weight as scrap and nobody else would take them at all.
I asked at the bank in 2017 and the girl was very nice and said they could not accept them and suggested a coin dealer. The coin dealer in town looked at eleven of them and said they were common dates in worn condition and worth a few pence each as metal, and asked where I had got them, and I said from a relative's house, which was the first lie I had told about it and not the last.
The shed is the shed my grandfather built. It is on the footprint of something older, because the floor is brick and the bricks are not the same as the walls, and it was a smallholding before it was a campsite and the family has had the land since 1908.
There was an honesty box then too. I know that because it is in a photograph in the house: my grandfather outside that shed in about 1960 with a sign behind him, and the sign says EGGS and a price I cannot read, and there is a box on the wall in the same place mine is bolted.
My mother is ninety and she grew up in that house and I have never asked her about the box, and I have decided that I am not going to, and the reason is that she mentioned it once herself, about fifteen years ago, completely unprompted, when we were talking about something else.
She said her father used to say you never argue with a customer who pays.
So the tin stays in the drawer in the office, and the stock is right, and the money is right, and nine times a season I take a coin out of a steel box bolted to a shed and put it in the tin and write the date in a notebook.
Fifty one coins now. The newest is 1967 and the oldest is 1937, and there is no pattern in the dates and I have looked for one for nine years.
And the firewood goes. That is the part I have made my peace with least. Somebody is getting a bundle of hardwood out of that shed and carrying it away and burning it somewhere, and paying for it, in full, in the money they have.