The tyranny of card-only payments

Even though being a right-centre comedian accords me default outsider status, I am not in any way an edgy bloke. Consequently, I find myself surprised at just how unnerved I’ve become by the drift towards a cashless society.

I’m not yet at the stage where I’ve started using phrases like ‘the great reset’ or renaming my first son ‘Crypto’, but I have become a bit twitchy about yet another huge change concerning the fundamentals of how we live (and the way we all ignored it when we realised we could go to a restaurant with a built-in reason to not tip).

The perils around the exclusive use of contactless payments are – like most things – something I hadn’t thought about much until it affected me. I was doing a couple of gigs in Dublin. Dublin is a lovely place to do stand-up, particularly if you’re a coward like me and abandon all political material upon arrival.