DADDY, WHAT WAS CASH?:

What's in your wallet? Do you even know where it is? In March last year I stuck a bank card in my pocket; since then, I've pretty much given up on the card, too. For the purposes of this exercise, I found and checked my wallet: there's a £5 note I accidentally ripped in half years ago, folded up very small, plus 38p. "The £20 I've had since I was sent home from work on 27 March 2020," says one friend, fairly typically. "The same £10 I've had in my purse for over a year." "£10.70 - the last of the £50 I took out at the beginning of first lockdown."

And when did you last use cash? For me, it was a cucumber plant (£1) two months ago. The plant guy is one of the few hold-outs among the off-grid types at the local "food circle" market - every kale-selling hippy has a sleek contactless terminal. We keep coins for supermarket trolleys, occasional parking, and some window cleaners are wedded to cash. These and tipping - many of us don't trust big companies to distribute digital tips fairly, with some justification - are the few remaining pockets of semi- consistent cash use among my friends and acquaintances.

This anecdotal stuff is backed by hard fact: cash payments fell by 35% in 2020 in the UK and five out of six payments are now cashless. In 2019, the Access to Cash review predicted that only one in 10 payments in the UK would be cash within a decade; now, chairman Natalie Ceeney says, "Covid might have accelerated that to next year." In April, Rishi Sunak announced a joint Treasury-Bank of England taskforce to explore the scope for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the UK: it's intended to provide a sort of official, ultra-secure alternative to bitcoin.

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