De-bloat Groat Float

Your Cat would like to apologise for a lack of communication over this last few weeks; this is chiefly attributable to a catatonic (and why not dogatonic?) state of disillusionment on my part with the turgid details of human history, narrative and biscuit. Some details have been too horrible, tedious, repetitive or downright boring to comment on...

However, this feline has now been suitably re-illusioned, and with a new spring in my step, a new Spring in the air (not to mention a dodecatonic song in my heart), I'm now ready to take on the world and enthuse about new developments in the lovely Kingdom of Northumbria.

And what better to rejoice about than the recent announcement from Oswine, the Grand Vizier and Keeper of the King's Treasury? The Momentous Announcement is that the Anglo-Saxon Groat - the staple of the Northumbrian economic system for untold millennia  - is going to be redesigned! Hooray for Oswine - and a welcome shaft of wit to cheer the heavily-laden masses! Such cheer and anticipation in boundless abandon and a bun dance.

When I shared the news - disseminated by the soothsayers in a fit of existential angst, boredom and crabcakes - with my vulpine friend Feaxede, he was positively overjoyed. As an instinctively progressive Redistributionist (despite abandoning his mother ship the Redistributionist Faction some time ago), Feaxede was excited that some measure of Change was at last coming to the Kingdom. However, apart from the fact that I have a fundamentally different ideological outlook to my foxy friend, I really can't say that I share his enthusiasm for this new development. Especially when I later discovered that the new coin of the Realm will be modelled on the diminutive Anglo-Saxon farthing, and will be adorned on one side with the jowls of Holy Empress Jose Borracho, the Mint Imperial of the Holy Roman Empire (which is neither holy, Roman nor an Empire). I also understand that special glass lenses will be needed in order to identify it...