Cash? I couldn't see the point. I had a few tenners in my wallet, and a zipper section crammed with pound coins and silver shrapnel.
I tried to get rid of it in cafes, corner shops and the like, and they didn't want to know.
“Sorry, cards only,” the assistants told me.
My daughter is a student and forever short of money, so in a fit of generosity, I emptied my wallet on her.
She seemed grateful, and so was I.
I was finally joining the 21st century and becoming completely cash free. As it turned out, I couldn't have picked a worse time.
In recent years there's been a huge global push to replace cash with digital payment methods.
Governments love the idea, because cash is hard to trace and can be used for criminal activities such as money laundering and taxation.
By contrast, electronic transactions create an audit trail.
Cash still made up more than half of all payments in 2013. Now it’s down to around one in 10 and falling. And as we've just discovered, it could backfire horribly.
This week's blackouts in Spain and Portugal have suddenly put the cashless society in a very different light.
In an emergency, cash is still king. Without power, complex digital money is completely useless.
Need to buy food when the power is down? Or water? Baby food? Want to take a taxi because the trains are out?
Europeans who tried to do these things were all given the same answer: “Sorry, cash only.”
In a crisis, only cash will cut it. Cards are just a useless piece of plastic.
And as for digital currencies such as Bitcoin? Forget it.
Doom-filled "preppers" reckon if society collapses, their pile of crypto-currency will be king. They're deluded.
It’ll be cash all the way.
The same goes for gold. It's the oldest store of value and its price rockets in a crisis, as we've seen lately. But you can't exchange a gold bar for loo roll.
Well you probably can, but you'll regret it when the lights come back on.
These days most investors buy gold on the internet anyway, so don't physically own it. Without power, digital gold is worthless.
Our politicians have only just woken up to the danger.
