Fifty UK branches a month have been closing since 2015 (Image: GETTY)
Nothing quite reassures like hard cash. Especially during times of upheaval and uncertainty. From the wallet stuffed with fifties under a mattress for emergencies to the crumpled fiver in a forgotten pocket, the sight and smell of money never fails to enthral.
Though the Covid-19 pandemic seems to have accelerated our transition to contactless, millions relied on cash throughout the ordeal.
According to Age UK, for everyday spending, one in five older people still do. Many aged 50-plus insist they always keep cash on hand. The charity warns cutting off the elderly from banking services and cash would be tantamount to excluding them from society.
Yet we are becoming cashless. My elderly mother is not the only one fretting about it. This is not just about paying the gardener, tipping a doorman, dropping a tenner in the plate in church or sliding a crisp twenty into a birthday card.
She, like many an octogenarian, knows where she is with pounds and pence. It’s the only kind of money that makes sense to her.
I, on the other hand, can’t remember the last time I had cash in my purse. I resist banking phone apps, but spend freely with my debit card. Even the homeless man outside the Co-op takes payments on that.
While cold, hard cash is rarely exchanged by most these days for rent, groceries and petrol, those on a tight budget tend to use it for everything. They stand a better chance of living within their means. At the other end, the super-rich sploshing the dosh are shelling out for privacy and anonymity.
Bank branch closures hit elderly people hardest (Image: GETTY)
My manicurist and dry-cleaner are cash-only traders. For some reason I believed this was illegal; that such businesses were avoiding their dues to HMRC. It’s not the case. Cash-only concerns are legitimate. All they need is a high street bank to deposit their takings in.
If they can find one, that is. Fifty UK branches a month have been closing since 2015. Between 2017 and 2020, some 13,000 free cash machines vanished. Also in 2020, some 900,000 older and disabled people had difficulties getting to an ATM.
The Treasury’s announcement late last week, that banks can no longer shut branches without establishing alternatives; and that they must now provide cash services within three miles of the “vast majority” of customers in rural areas, and no more than a mile in towns and cities, is cold comfort to Auntie Olwen in Powys who lives alone in a cottage on the edge of beyond.
Who doesn’t drive, who waits in vain for a single bus a week that doesn’t always turn up, and where Uber or equivalent taxi services, if she could afford them, are unavailable?
Cash is king? If you can get your hands on it. Come the apocalyptic blackout, only those with fivers under the bed will get dinner.
I’m too gabby, I can’t help it
I must lack the let-it-go gene. I complain to store managers about misspelled wall signs.
I correct incoming emails before replying. That orthology had become an obsession was rammed home on Sunday by BBC‘s TV coverage of the women’s World Cup final.
Not that I was shattered by the result. The best team won. We woz not robbed. What ruined it for me were linguistic stumbles by the otherwise queenly host Gabby Logan, who has interviewed me and who is as fabulous as she appears.
But she described coach Sarina Wiegman as “a phenomena”. She later described ball possession as having “swang”.
I had to lie down.
I was told by a psychologist at a dinner party that I probably had a developmental disorder.
I thanked her. Before bickering with my host about the salad dressing.
Like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, this pedant requires condiments and cream on the side.
On the side, our Lionesses were certainly left. It doesn’t make them losers. It never will.
Parking drives most men mad
A new study reveals that women outperform men parking their cars. Men are apparently more likely to prang the motor while wielding it into a space.
Playing bumper cars as they bounce it back and forth, scraping hubcaps against kerbs and crunching bollards, their efforts are frustrating to behold. Especially from the vantage point of the passenger seat.
It’s about patience. Women typically have more of it. My ex-husband would always lose his rag while attempting to park. He’d give up after a minute, leap from the vehicle and storm off, leaving me to slide across and finish what he’d started. Despite this, he regarded himself as a superior motorist.
According to Forbes Advisor insurance, 53 percent of men consider themselves fine parkers. To which I have but a single response: Yes, Milady.
Time to get on message about the latest trendy jean therapy
I rarely wear anything but black or denim, and I admit to owning a couple of pairs of M&S jeans. Marks & Spencer has become the go-to destination for ladies’ jeans, having a 13 percent market share.
The chain’s news that double denim will be the Autumn trend is depressing, as is its prediction that the familiar wide-leg, Mom and Boyfriend styles will dominate. Again!
I fancied a pair that zipped by on social media, the Ex-Boyfriend Slim: ‘We want the customer to feel a sort of low-level simmering resentment each time she puts these on.’
My imagination did overtime. Ladies, what say you to Ex-Mother-in-Law Low-Slungs?
Team with a gold shirt to wear to lunch and relish the memory of her disapproval. Or the Revenge, a lift-and-separate miracle for rear subsidence.
Or my fave, the Lunch-Hour High-Rise. You looking at me?
Think it’s all over? Forget it
“I’m a forgive and forget person,” insists Coleen Rooney, in Vogue’s September issue. “I can’t be bothered with things going on and on.”
Come again? When she outed Rebekah Vardy for having leaked information from Rooney’s private Instagram account, did she expect her rival to take it lying down?
Vardy fought back with gleaming teeth, and glossed nails, and a libel action which she lost, along with about £1.5million of Leicester City striker husband Jamie’s earnings.
But the Wagatha Christie sensation is far from over. Coleen has just designer-handbagged herself a multi-million-pound deal for a major documentary about it. Which could yet turn out to be a whopping own-goal.
Mrs Vardy’s probably plotting as we speak.
Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls
Universal Music Group’s new Queen Greatest Hits collection is tailored for Yoto, an audio platform for woke listeners.
A notable deletion is 1978 hit Fat-Bottomed Girls, penned by Brian May. The number is of its time. To cancel it is to suggest it was designed to offend.
The single, a double A-side with Bicycle Race, was inspired by the Tour de France. The band hired a greyhound stadium and paid 65 naked girls to ride bikes loaned by Halfords, who insisted they pay for replacement saddles, which, if anyone bothered to keep them, could sell out a Sotheby’s auction by themselves.
