“Cheques will be phased out by October 2018, but only if adequate alternatives are developed, the UK Payments Council – the body that oversees payments strategy – has said. The Council said there should be ‘no scenario’ for using cheques by 2018. The target date for the closure of the system that processes cheques has been set for 31 October 2018, after the board described the payment method as in ‘terminal decline’”.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a cheque; in fact, it’s so long ago that I can’t even remember when my last cheque book ran out of cheques and I didn’t get a new book because they stopped sending them out, and the process of ordering a new book had become so cumbersome that I couldn’t be bothered.

All the news coverage of the arguments from the banking institutions about why in nine years time there should be no more cheques has focussed on how in the modern era supermarkets stopped accepting cheques years ago, and anyway everybody is doing their shopping online with their cards anyway; there’s been a little discussion about the small trader (the plumber, the rooder, the small seller of handmade jewellery at a local craft fair) who currently doesn’t have the ability to accept payment by card, and that has been turned around into how the banking industry still has work to do to make it easy for those people to accept electronic payment.

Now it’s true that modern business needs to adapt to the modern world, even if the business you are in is the oldest business in the world.

But what is – as always in situations like this – being ignored is that it’s not just business which needs to hand over money from one party to another.

What about the scenario of the auntie who wants to give her nephew a hefty cash present for a significant birthday? She can hardly withdraw a hundred notes from the cash machine and put them in the envelope with the birthday card, can she? She admittedly could do a bank transfer, but (a) it’s not the same as receiving the actual token of cash, and (b) it’s more faff for her. Internet banking is an option for many, but even me - Digitally Engaged™ since 1982 – doesn’t bother with that because of the faff involved, and as more and more people take up mobile internet options as their primary if not sole internet connexion that option is so much faffier. Or the scenario of the mate who needs to borrow some money from another mate – again, it’s technically possible for an electronic funds transfer to take place from one account to another, but practically, it’s a major bother, when simply writing a cheque is the easiest option for them.

But then that’s the modern world, isn’t it? Stuff The Customer.