David Hill wrote:

What ever happened to the good old British £ ?

News only guarantees transmission of 7 bit ASCII characters. The pound
sign is an 8-bit ASCII character and will be filtered out by some news
servers. The same goes for all those idiots that think it's clever to
put characters from the extended Windows character set into their posts.
Some servers will strip the characters and replace them with blanks,
some sill simply drop that particular post on the floor.

Since you're a gardener, the best response is probably "there, there,
don't you worry it's a bit technical."

--
Mathematicians, please don't drink and derive.