Small change ...

 J wanted to send a birthday card to her sister.

Nothing wrong with that, and she even had a card ready.

Now it currently costs $1.20 to send a small letter or card anywhere in Australia, and an extra 55c if you want it sent priority (a bit like first class mail in the UK, and considerably cheaper than express post).

Well, she was running late, and asked me to post it, Express wasn't worth it as it was a weekend and we live in a rural area, but priority might just make a difference.

Like most people nowadays we hardly send letters. A scrabble through my drawers revealed some year old $1.10 stamps, and that was about it,

Since the pandemic, we have of course gone cashless. Every few months I take out $80 or so from a cash machine and that covers us for things like take out coffees when the coffee shop's eftpos machine is down and rural honesty box produce stands.

Even the small traders at farmers markets have portable eftpos machines plugged into a phone these days, so you really don't need cash.

However, this time it seemed simpler to pay cash - surely I must have a couple of dollar coins somewhere - if only for Aldi trolley deposit fees.

Another scrabble - some euro cent coins, a British 10p, a couple of Fijian 20c coins, a Singapore 10c coin and a handful of Malaysian small change, and finally, a $2 coin. I'd actually forgotten what they looked like and had to check that it was one of ours, and not some overseas exotica left over from some pre-pandemic journey.

This of course begs the question - when we go cashless what do we do about small transaction?

I've read that in some countries you can write your mobile phone number in place of the stamp and the phone company add your postage costs, which might be useful if you used the postal service a lot, but when you only send a few letters a year seems just as silly and just as much overhead as using a card to pay $1.75 ...