London - If you are a very lucky person, gifted with a smart job or wealthy parents, you may well at some point have held in your hand wads of cash.
To you it may be no big deal whatsoever to clasp a few grand in your hand.
However, for those of us not playing right midfield for the Arsenal or having Adele for a parent, pretty much the only time you will ever be able to hold a thick pile of cash in your hand is when you are playing Monopoly. And this is the reason why I frowned when I read that the makers of said board game have launched a cashless version of the game.
Before I go on, I should give you some background on my relationship with Monopoly. To sum it up, I openly hate Monopoly. Always have done. I hate the way it takes seven hours to play it. I hate the way it turns ordinary punters into the smuggest of smug absentee landlords. I hate the bloody top hat and the naffing dog. I hate the way that, at the turn of a card, you can find yourself in jail for doing absolutely nothing to anyone, anywhere. It's like bloody Nicaragua in the 1980s: people disappearing right, left and centre.
Most of all, I hate the way that my sister always, always won at Monopoly. She was the Donna Trump of her day, the Alana Sugar of south Glasgow.
There I would be, innocently traipsing around London's nicer streets in the guise of a pewter racecar. At the throw of a die, I would set foot on somewhere like Park Lane and of course, of course, my sister would have four hotels, a restaurant and a leisure centre already built on the site. She would tap some numbers into her calculator and - wham - I would be hit with a bill for several thousand “pounds”. And while the money may have been fake, my resentment and fury was certainly all too real.
I may have tolerated this financial waterboarding for half an hour or so, but eventually I would get sick of the sight of my sister's towering stacks of cash and explode in a cash-poor temper. The board would then go flying, my sister's burgeoning property empire would sail through the air and I would be labelled, quite rightly, a bad-tempered bad loser with no hope of ever making any real money.
So you can see why I might greet the news of a new cashless Monopoly game with sadness. Yes, the game will be shorter, yes there won't be the temptation to stash the money up your sleeve for a rainy day. But think how easy it will be to get into financial difficulties. Paper money is real. When you hand it over for a purchase, it is a tangible thing that is leaving your possession.
If all we have to do to buy some naff property on Old Kent Road is have our card scanned, I worry that too many people (me, mainly) will fall into the trap of viewing it as not really money and end up in real trouble. I think in future I'll stick to KerPlunk.
The Independent