I can’t ​ remember the last time I used cash. My bank statements show that I haven’t made a withdrawal from a cashpoint in the last twelve months. That’s just as well, since it’s significantly more of an effort to get hold of cash than it used to be. Before the pandemic, there were seven cashpoints within a five-minute walk from my house. All of them have now gone: the four attached to banks disappeared when the branches closed, the two in supermarkets were removed, the random one outside a building that used to be a bank but is now a bar has also vanished. Nerds like to say that the plural of anecdote is not data, but in this case, it kind of is, since the general decline in the use of cash is a marked phenomenon across the developed world, and especially in the UK. According to UK Finance, the sector’s trade association, in 2009 cash was used in 58 per cent of all transactions. The figure today is 9 per cent.…