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I can't really see why everyone gets so exercised. It's just money. My suspicion is that much of it comes down to parakrousis, my new favourite word. Well, it's my new favourite old word. It comes from the ancient Greek (I love that expression – it always makes it sound as if there were just the one: some bearded fellow leaning on a Doric column handing out bon mots to passers-by). Parakrousis means the striking of a slightly wrong note in an otherwise tuneful harmony. I think a lot of the trouble with the euro lies with that.

Britain has had a single national currency for almost a thousand years, but actually the origins of the pound sterling go back even further still – to when the naughty Vikings came over (from my home country, of course). They got, frankly, much worse press than they deserved, but one thing that they did do was demand the Anglo-Saxons pay them Danegeld. To do that, they needed coins, presumably because there were only so many chickens the Vikings could eat. So, in 928, centuries before other major European countries had their own currency, King Athelstan declared that only one currency could be used in England. It's been like that ever since. So if you want to give credit for the founding of the pound, I'm afraid it belongs to the Danes.

Maybe the fact that a uniform national currency came to these fair islands 600 years before the French caught on to the idea – and nearly 900 years before the Germans and Italians – helps explain why the British are so reluctant to embrace a single European currency today.

Lots of countries had drastic currency changes after the Second World War so maybe that’s why another change doesn’t seem like a big deal to many Europeans

Yet there have been European currency unions before. There was the Latin Monetary Union, started in 1861 by the French, when France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and Greece all happily bought chocolate and beer or whatever from each other with gold and silver coins. That went quite well until the 1920s when it faded away. The most successful union was the Zollverein of 1834, whereby the separate currencies, weights and measures of the previously independent German states were gradually combined, leading to the unification of Germany in 1871. Lots of European countries had to have drastic currency changes after the Second World War, which is probably why having another change doesn't seem like such a big deal to many Europeans. So maybe the euro reluctance is down to British fear of change, but I don't think it's that either. To be honest, I think it's the name.

Euro. It just doesn't sound very nice. It's parakrousis – a slightly wrong note in an otherwise tuneful harmony. "Dollar", which sounds quite nice, was born in a small town in Bohemia. Coins made in the town of Sankt Joachimsthal were known as Joachimstaler; people shortened that to taler, which later became dollar. The dollar symbol, by the way, comes from Spain – the two parallel lines on the S represent the Pillars of Hercules (upon which rests the Spanish coat of arms) and the S represents the plural for dollars or pesos. I could go on astounding you with my knowledge of monetary history, but I haven't the space. My point, though, is that no country can claim a currency or its name as having been without outside influence.