Antique Monopoly

I thought that we might have a quick break from some of the darker stuff going on.

The other day I was going through some old stuff - having an "Autumn" clean - and found this: my parent's old Monopoly set.

I know that it belonged to my parents because I remember playing with this copy of Monopoly as a child, sometimes with playmates, but most especially with my brother. During school holidays, if the weather was a bit dull or worse, we would have Monopoly marathons which would last up to 3 days.

When we ran out of Monopoly money, we'd steal the money from our Payday game, and simply continue. Of course, we had to change the rules to make sure that none of us, would ever go bankrupt and have to stop playing. This is, until we were sufficiently bored or the weather fined up and our parents threw us out of the house.

The set was bought by my parents around 1965 or 1966. This is because of the address on the box comes from a time not long after I was born.

This bloody scoundrel's got my parent's money.

What do you mean no batteries required?

I know that there are many different varieties of Monopoly these days - but this one is from them olden days with the proper London street names - all assigned upper, middle and lower class property values, as was fitting at the time.

"By Jove, we're British and must respect the class system don't you know!" Piss off Grandpa. The game of Monopoly is a U.S. invention anyway.

The only utilities that you could invest in were the Water works and the Electric company. None of those fancy mobile phone services, cable TV or internet service providers.


And Free Parking in London? Did that actually used to happen? Perhaps you might find some now what with the congestion tax and all.

I suspect in London if you had enough money you could always buy your way out of jail - but getting out free?

It still costs a ridiculous amount of cash for your Barrister, and perhaps a few bribes for some dodgy judges, politicians and warders.

What's that Grandpa? "The youth of today are just good-for-nothing rabble rousers. I reckon them coppers should lock 'em all up and throw away the key." Piss off Grandpa!

However, the powers-that-be seem to be listening to you. Rates of youth incarceration in countries such as the UK, USA and Australia are higher than they've ever been. The popular solution is not more social support and proper job creation. It's to build more jails.

Now you can buy the jail itself, and still have some change left over to pick up a nice slice of the privatised railway - certainly in the UK. Why does it always seem that so many Public-Private ventures end up in a screaming monetary mess, and it's us poor fucking taxpayers who always foot the bill?

We're selling off the farm, guys!

I always loved the fact that in this old version of the game, the currency is in Pounds. Good old British (or perhaps Australian or New Zealand) Pounds. When they still had shillings and pence too! "Proper money, not like those Yankee-style decimal currencies," grumbles Grandpa.

"And what do you mean we're metric now? Harrumph! Never did like those uppity French chappies anyway." Piss off Grandpa!

To my eye the old pound £ symbol always seemed a little more elegant than the dollar $ sign. Sort of like a lot of old symbols such as the Ampersand or the Treble Clef. So nice to write.

As for the metric system and decimal currency, I'm a big fan. It's my scientific background I guess. These systems may lack a history, but they're clean, logical and easy to use.

These look more like Euro notes rather than modern pounds. And the £1 note is now a coin.

Nonetheless, the actual notes were nice and colourful, unlike real Pound notes at the time, and certainly more interesting that the "greenbacks" of the US currency. They all look the same!

They say that life is a game of chance, and at its core, the game of Monopoly is the same. You never know what the next throw of the dice will bring. You can go from potentate to pauper in a small number of rolls.

If that's the case then I've rolling some bad numbers over the last few years.

Note that in the picture above, one of the original wooden dice is missing and been replaced by a plastic one (on the right.) I guess that's what happens when kids are allowed to get near games like this with lots of bits and pieces. "Mummy, I just ate the little dog. Soooorry."

I would put in a picture of the little dog, or the iron, or some of the other standard tokens, but they are missing. I think I saw them somewhere during the Great Cleanup of the family home when my father died. I wouldn't have thrown them out, but at the time couldn't find the Monopoly game itself.

These are the rules, based on the Industrial-Capitalist economic systems which seem to rule much of the world.

One of the basic rules is that if things are tough, and you don't have the money, then you're fucked.

Mind you, if you're rich then things can go down the gurgler in a very short space of time.

Owning property seems to be the key to success in this game, and you can collect some pretty stiff rents, from seemingly random passers-buy, and they're only wooden houses!

In the real world this is called extortion and you may indeed proceed directly to jail.

Unless you're a successful underworld figure, or as they are called in Sydney sometimes "a colourful racing identity". Then you might get that "Get out of Jail Free Card."

Mind you, if only we could pay rents like that now. £200 for a single house is just a dream.

Especially in a place like swanky Mayfair. Although perhaps the area is not all that it's cracked up to be. Not these days.

Times, and what is cool and expensive change pretty quickly. The rent for a new East-End apartment must be pretty astronomical! Then again so is a wooden cottage in inner-city Sydney (watch out for the yummy asbestos...)

Anyway, it was nice to find this set, a piece of my childhood (and that of my brother's.)

Better go now. It's stupid o'clock in the morning - and I have to be up at 6:30 to get to the hospital to have my very first Chemo hooked up. Is that anything like your first My Little Pony?

Yes, you guessed it, Mr. Pain has come for a serious visit again. Feels like he's moved in. I wish he'd fuck off and go rent a wooden house in Mayfair.