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. I like it, particularly the theatre of it. The week-on-week frantic fumbling for a wallet, as though the offertory has been sprung like a nasty surprise. My personal difficulty is that I really can’t afford to give them a tenner every week. I don’t want to say ‘I gave last time’, and I wouldn’t have the chutzpah to ask them to give me change.

Church-giving is of course the least of it. There are many occasions when parting with a few coins feels like the right thing to do.
I dislike adding a restaurant tip electronically, for example.

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