A blog. By me, about the coin business? This could go one of two ways.

One thing that having something of a profile in my profession has brought home to me is that some of my behaviour has the potential to impact on my financial future. Now I've never done a Mark Latham and (allegedly?) broken a cab driver's arm while drunk in a taxi, but I am human and sometimes it mightn't work out well if my clients found out just how "human" I am! What does this have to do with a blog about the market for rare coins in Australia?

I've done a reasonable amount of writing on numismatics in the past few years - two books, articles in the "Australasian Coin & Banknote Magazine", as well as a stack of writing for Monetarium's "Monetary Journal". Some of it approaching scholarly, nearly all of it well received. No hand grenades in there, so we're good so far.
In addition to these diligent efforts at the written word however, within the confines of my own privacy I admit to having:

• Grumbled, moaned, shouted about and generally slagged off certain less than agreeable members of the general public that have telephoned in to find out about the value of a coin, note or collection they have;
• Animatedly described certain folks I've met at coins shows in a less than flattering manner;
• Openly scorned the efforts of others going about their business doing exactly what I do for a living - trading rare coins & banknotes.

When I lived in Japan about a decade ago, one of my conversational English language students explained the (Japanese) concept of "tatemae" and "honne" - I heard it as being how a person presents themself to the world, and how they actually are. That the Japanese have two different words for a person's thoughts; opinions and behaviour is just one way of highlighting the fact that private and public worlds aren't always reconciled with each other.

If I'm going to be halfway authentic in my posts on this blog (vital to remaining motivated I tell you know), there'll be shards of personal opinion coming through pretty regularly - let's just hope I'm still able to feed the kids once it's out there.