Why cash is still king to me

I recently set out on a simple mission: to break the £10 note in my purse so I’d have a five to put in the church collection plate on Sunday. My first attempt backfired. The café, where my order was delivered with an eye-roll of metro disdain, no longer accepted cash payments. I sat at one of their pavement tables, drinking the single macchiato I’d neither wanted nor needed, and considered my next move.

I’m aware that cash is now regarded as a grubby anachronism. All those hands it passes through! Eww! Of the two churches I attend, one has stayed ahead of this trend and installed payment terminals in the nave: tap and give. I can offer no rational objection to this. I simply don’t like it. It doesn’t feel like giving, just as in shops tapping doesn’t feel like actual spending.

My other church still clings to the parishioner-with-a-basket method of collecting donations and I suspect always will.