pound • noun, definition: the unit of money in the UK, symbol: £

£100 buys: 117 cans of Heinz baked beans from Sainsbury's. 20 pints of beer. 5 London cab rides lasting 15-30 minutes. 7 men's haircuts. 15g of marijuana at London street prices. 38% of the weekly National Minimum Wage. 2.1% of the Royal Family's daily food costs, according to the Royal Accounts. 200 rounds of 7.62x39mm AK-47 ammunition. 0.000002% of the UK's £4,700,000,000 weapons sales to Saudi Arabia since the bombing of Yemen began in 2015. 0.00000005% of the £205,000,000,000 cat of replacing Trident, the UK's strategic nuclear deterrent, according to UK government figures compiled by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. 0.00036% of a new B61-12 bomb, the world's most expensive, which the US Government Accountability Office estimates each cost approx. £27,500,000. 0.00000005% of the estimated £200,000,000,000 cost of Brexit to the UK economy by the end of 2020, according to research by Bloomberg Economics. 0.00000003% of the UK government's £322,000,000,000 expenses fighting COVID-19 in the current financial year, according to the UK government's Office for Budget Responsibility. 33 doses of a SARS-CoV-2 candidate vaccine currently under development in the UK, projected to cost 83 a dose. 0.000005% of the estimated £2,200,000,000 spent annually watching the UK public on CCTV and surveillance cameras, according to the UK's Surveillance Camera Commissioner. 60% of the UK's calculated daily cost of keeping a prisoner like Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison. 0.00014% of David Hockney's painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)', which sold in 2018 for a record £76,000,000, making Hockney the world's most expensive living artist, before being bumped from first place by Jeff Koons whose ‘Rabbit' sold in 2019 for £77.000,000. 0.00000007% of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' net worth of £160,000,000,000, currently the world's richest man according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 69 days of living under the World Bank's global poverty line of £1.45 per day, together with 700-800 million people. 10% of a cremation, at average UK funeral prices.

Ai Weiwei