Country mouse on the demise of notes and coins

Have you noticed how the little 1p piece coin is slipping quietly out of your life? You won't have many in your pockets anymore and for good reason: fewer and fewer goods or products are priced-as part of that once enormously frustrating marketing trickery-in increasing sequences of 99p.

Spending a penny is a thing of the past (it's now 30p to use the gents at Waterloo) and, like the farthing and the halfpenny, the coin's days seem numbered. Cash, it seems, is almost dead. Like many, when cash is finally phased out, I will miss the realism and perspective of using notes and coins-something credit cards can never match. Unlike cash, credit cards make money anonymous.

I'm told that, as so many British adults don't understand what ‘30% off' means, supermarkets are going to give up this form of promotion and just tell the public what they will save on the promotion in pounds. This is sad and frightening on so many levels. When we have a country whose population doesn't understand the basics of budgeting and the simplest maths, it's no wonder that we find ourselves in so much debt.