Plates

As you would expect, given the circumspect nature of the English personality, vanity plates in England aren’t very vain.

When you buy a new car, it comes with a number plate that stays with the car for life, black type on white on the front, black type on yellow on the back.

Why? There are dozens of different opinions, the most popular being that it’s to let drivers differentiate which is the front of the car and which is the back of the car.

I think if that’s how you tell whether a vehicle is coming or going, you shouldn’t be on the road.

But I digress.

Some years ago, realizing an opportunity to make money was being overlooked, the UK government began to regularly publish lists of numbers they were about to issue, and then put them up for auction. You can’t order a number or letter combination, but you can bid on one that has a letter and number combination you want, usually something that seems to more or less spell out a word or name or phrase or incorporate a sequence you value.

Buy a number letter combination, you own it forever.

Take the sequence “KRI5 HNA” (which, of course, sort of looks like the word KRISHNA)

It sold in May of 2015 for £230,000.

Way less than the £285,000. billionaire Roman Abramovich reportedly paid for “VIP 1”, and nothing compared to what Saudi Businessman Saeed Abdul Ghaffar Khouri is said to have paid for the sequence that graces his Rolls Royce.

Khouri’s plate bears just a single character: the numeral “1”.

The significance is obvious: it’s the plate Donald Trump would salivate over.

And it cost Khouri £7.25 million.

Just last week, somebody bid £21,000. for “1111 AS”, and £31,000. for “110 A”, clearly because they believed in the mystical power of the number “11” which many people claim has enormous spiritual, metaphysical, and psychological power.

Clear proof that a) numerology is alive and well and b) that some people have way more money than is good for them.