Foreign travel and different bank notes remind me of my dad’s insistence on always returning home from foreign holidays with currency for his personal memory box. The note above is from the former state of Yugoslavia which dad visited several times in the 198os.
Even if it was 90˚ in the shade and everyone was desperate for a last drink at the airport dad was determined to bring a souvenir note or coin home and would hang on with a steadfast determination that would deny last minute refreshment to everyone so long as he could get his monetary mementos back home safely. How glad I am of that because now they belong to me and now my own left over bank notes from my travel adventures have been added to the collection.
The euro is useful because it has simplified travel to Europe but I miss the old pre-euro currencies. To have a wallet full of romantic and exciting sounding notes made you feel like a true international traveller. I liked the French franc and the Spanish peseta and the Greek drachma of course but my absolute favourite was the Italian lira simply because you just got so many.
When going on holiday to Italy you were, for just a short time anyway, a real millionaire. The first time I went to Italy, to Sorrento in 1976, the notes were so worthless that it was normal practice for shops to give change in the form of a postcard of a handful of sweets.
My most favourite bank notes are probably from Switzerland. Everyone knows that the Swiss are fond of money and they leave no one in any doubt of this with the quality of their notes. Not only are they brilliantly colourful but they are printed on high quality paper as well and one is thing for certain – these notes are not going to fall apart easily. Another interesting thing about the Swiss Franc is that there is something about it which prevents it being scanned and half way through the process the scanner stops and produces a message on screen that it cannot copy a bank note.
Age of Innocence 
An interesting collection. My own stops short at 10 each of £1 and 10 shilling uncirculated notes my father had kept from pre-decimal days, but that’s all – except for a large and heavy box full of pre-decimal coins which I really should look through one day!
I remember buying a can of Coke in Bodrum with a note, and being given a mixture of coins and Juicy Fruit as change – I thought it was just another example of Turks ripping off tourists!