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The cheque celebrates its 350th birthday today – or to be more accurate, the oldest cheque anyone now knows about was issued 350 years ago in 1659, towards the end of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth period. Will it still be around to celebrate its 700th birthday? Who knows?
But with half of the high street banks teetering on the brink, and many more focused on getting through the next 350 days rather than the next 350 years, the answer is probably not. Some suggest the cheque will disappear in as little as 10 years. A report for banks published last year suggested "active management of the decline of the cheque" will lead to a possible closure of "clearing" – the system that moves money from the cheque writer's account to the recipient's – around 2018.
An inevitable end? Almost certainly. Cheque usage hit a peak in 1990 and has been on a sharp decline ever since. Plastic is easier to use in shops (few major stores now accept cheques), phone companies routinely surcharge cheque payers, and internet banking combining with faster payments means cash can whiz in an instant from your account to mine.
But I still use cheques and shall miss them if they go.
On a practical level, there's no easier way for me to pay the butcher, greengrocer and newsagent – especially when I let the bills run up. I can make payments without having to go through six layers of online security and trying to remember the exact name of my first school. It's quick. I don't have to wait for the computer to power up – cheques take seconds to write and sign. And I have a permanent record via the cheque stub.
Last month my wife struggled to pay her tax bill from her Nationwide online account to HMRC via the drop-down menu. But as Nationwide demanded ever more codes and random numbers she decided to cut her time losses and post a cheque.
But it goes beyond the purely practical. Receiving a royalties cheque for one of my books is so much more satisfying than an emailed bank transfer. And where would the charity world be without those monster cheques showing the generosity of some corporate giant?
Some serve as salutary lessons of my mistakes – the large pile of $0.30 dividend cheques (or should that be checks) remind me of a particularly useless share I once bought. And some are great examples of the printer's art – collectible, too, if signed by some famous person. Will you miss cheques if they disappear – or have they already vanished from your life?
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