That twenty euro note in my purse for the past year is like a relic from the past

Idon’t like to boast, but I currently have €2.45 in coins. I acquired it — since I assume you’re suddenly fiercely jealous — by hoovering The Boy’s bedroom floor, something I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do any more. But I was doing the landing and, because there was some piece of detritus half-in and half-out of his bedroom, tantalising the Dyson, I opened the door — a sort of gateway to one of Dante’s inner circles of hell — and once I started, I just couldn’t stop myself. And there was all that lovely money, just lying around, mainly 10 cent and 5 cent pieces, which The Boy clearly doesn’t consider legal tender. Some of it may have been piled up on his bedside locker which I might have accidentally hit the hoover against so that it toppled onto the floor, but that is of no great importance. The bigger picture is that for the first time in over a year, I have coins.

We used to talk about the cashless society in the same way we talk about flying cars: a fantastic, futuristic notion that would probably never happen. We certainly couldn’t have predicted that a cashless economy would be an accidental by-product of a global pandemic.

Yet here we are. I can’t be the only one whose change purse no longer bulges out of shape with weighty coins of all denominations. The exchequer might tell us that we all have more savings than when this all started (though I’ve yet to see any credible evidence of this in my own world), but very few of us have any actual money. Remember the old money? Well, it turns out that the new money is now the old money and the new money is no money at all.

It’s not just coins that are conspicuous by their absence. I have been squiring the same €20 note around with me for months now. It was forty, but without me spending a cent of it, it has whittled down to a single note, presumably because somebody in my house is robbing me even more blind than I knew. I took it on holidays last month, just in case.

Imagine that: I am old enough to remember signing travellers’ cheques to go on holidays and now, here I am heading into the unknown with nothing but a debit card, a Leap card and a single €20 note in my purse. If I’d shown up at Heuston Station to find a flying car waiting for me, I don’t think I’d have been terribly surprised.

As it happened, the twenty didn’t survive the holiday. It went — as I knew it would — on taxi fares and was presently supplemented by several other notes that I acquired from an old-style ATM which somehow hadn’t rusted over. It turns out that down the country, not all taxi drivers have signed up to an app or have the means to process debit cards in their cars.

One enterprising driver had fashioned a protective screen from a shower curtain and rail which he’d erected around himself, but he was still taking only filthy lucre into his sterile cubicle. And in spite of it now being officially a biohazard, I quite liked having money in my pocket again. It was a bit like going to a school reunion: you know you’ve no real need of these people in your life any more, but it’s quite comforting to know they still exist.

Besides, I’d been worried about the beggars and the buskers. I hadn’t encountered either on my brief excursion into Dublin city last month, but there was a brilliant musician on Shop Street in Galway who I felt bad about, because if I’d had any cash on me at all, he would have deserved it. As it happened, I was still carrying the sole €20 note at that early point of the holiday and in terms of surrendering that shred of holiday security, I might as well have given him my emergency knickers and had done with it.

But there will be other worthy buskers and beggars and like the taxi drivers in the West of Ireland, I’d imagine not too many of them are set up with contactless card payments.

I don’t suppose they’ll be exactly thrilled with €2.45 of The Boy’s small change either, but now that I’ve started, I can probably hoover up some more. And it’s certainly better than walking on by.

Still, I’m not sure how any of the street people are coping in this suddenly cashless world.

Inundated with huge headlines and bigger pictures, there are so many small change conversations we still need to have.