Do those of you over a certain age ever hanker for the days before plastic debit, credit, reward and store cards dominated all our retail and financial activities?

I have such fond memories of only having to worry about the cash in my pocket and the cheque book which spent most of its time in my drawer at home. My wallet just contained money of the folding kind and there wasn’t always much of that in my first job when my weekly salary was two pounds. Mind you, this was long before the pound coin appeared and that wallet could have contained four ten bob notes (ask your parents!).

I know the credit card is amazingly useful and we can’t turn the clock back; in fact, I wouldn’t want to, but I can’t help harbouring a sneaking nostalgia for the simplicity of the shopping of my youth.

I have just counted the plastic cards in my wallet. There are twenty three. They enable me to shop, travel, get books from the library or prove my entitlement to healthcare, breakdown assistance or discounts. I tried to cull, I really did. But there is not one of them that I do not use at some time to my benefit, although I did find that I had identical membership cards for breakdown insurance, for some reason. So, despite my best endeavours, nett reduction – one.

If you want to separate your spending for ease of domestic and professional accounting later, then more than one credit card offers advantages. So I have several of them. Each of them has a pin code to remember and I had to radically rethink my use of a single pin code that I used for many cards when one of them was compromised. So, now I have a little book with them all in, plus all the online and website logins and passwords for tax, for utilities, for the bank etc. But that little book is now my biggest security risk. Maybe I should use some code that would fool anyone purloining my little book. Say – put down the code for the card above in the list. But then, of course, the more difficult it is for the thief to decipher, the more difficult it is for ME to remember.

It was so much simpler in my youth. You either had the money in your pocket, or you didn’t.