Sample chapter from Modern bollocks
They’re comin’ for the last two things that still make a man a man: cash in your pocket and the right to be a forgettable nobody.
First they sold us the dream: “Digital ID will make life easier, Bob! No more carryin’ cards, no more rememberin’ passwords, just wave your phone and everything opens like a magic bloody carpet.”
Aye, and I’m sure the Stasi said the same about their filing cabinets.
One day soon you’ll have a single digital “you”. Every doctor’s appointment, every speeding ticket, every time you bought haemorrhoid cream at 3 a.m. from the 24-hour garage, every dodgy website you visited when the missus was at bingo, every opinion you ever muttered on the internet, all neatly tied to one unbreakable ID. They’ll call it “convenience”. I call it a leash with extra data harvesting.
And the absolute cherry on top of this dystopian cake? Central Bank Digital Currency. CBDC. Sounds like a venereal disease for robots, which is about right.
No more grubby fivers that smell of stripper’s perfume and sweat. No more stuffing twenty quid in the grandkid’s birthday card. No more cash-in-hand for the lad who cuts your lawn or the barmaid who lets you off the last half-pint. Everything will be programmable money straight from the Bank of England’s cold, dead hands into yours.
Programmable.
Let that word sink in for a second.
Your wages land on the 25th. Lovely. Except the nice people at HM Treasury have decided you’ve spent too much on lager this month, so £42.30 of your pay is locked behind “responsible spending limits” until you complete an online alcohol-awareness course. Fancy a bet on the 3:30 at Doncaster? Sorry mate, gambling quota exceeded. Want to buy your nephew a can of Monster and a bag of pork scratchings? Declined, sugar tax threshold reached.
They’ll dress it up as “protecting vulnerable people”. Translation: protecting the government from people who won’t do as they’re bloody told.
Imagine the scene in five years:
I’m in the bookies, tryin’ to stick a tenner on a horse called Big Bastard’s Revenge. Phone beeps:
“Transaction declined. Carbon footprint allowance exceeded this week. Suggested alternative: walk home.”
Walk home? It’s pissin’ it down and I’ve got arthritis in both knees!
Or picture this: some spotty civil servant in Whitehall decides the unvaxxed, the Brexit voters, the blokes who still call a spade a spade, are a “risk to social cohesion”. One click and half the country’s money turns into pumpkin at midnight. No appeal, no judge, no jury. Just a little note: “Account frozen pending review of your social-credit score.”
And the worst part? Half the population will cheer it on because “it’ll stop benefit fraud” and “it’s only fair”. Same idiots who thought track-and-trace was about keeping nan safe, not training us to scan a QR code every time we fancied a pint.
I went to the cash machine the other day. Sign on it: “From April 2026 this ATM will only dispense £200 per day for personal accounts.” Personal accounts! They’re already rationing cash like it’s wartime corned beef.
Meanwhile the banks are closin’ branches faster than pubs in a temperance town. Try payin’ a roofer cash nowadays, he looks at you like you’ve offered him a wheelbarrow of turnips. Everyone wants “contactless” or a bank transfer. Bank transfer! So some faceless algorithm can decide whether I’m allowed to fix me own roof.
I like cash. Cash is honest. Cash doesn’t grass you up. Cash has never sent me a notification saying “Unusual spending pattern detected – 12 kebabs in 14 days.” Cash just sits there in me wallet, quiet and loyal, waitin’ for the moment I need to bribe a doorman or pay for a lock-in.
When cash dies, anonymity dies with it. And when anonymity dies, freedom dies. Simple as that.
They’ll sell CBDC to you wrapped in pretty paper: “No more card fees! Instant payments! Fight crime!”
What they mean is: no more privacy, total control, and if you step out of line we’ll switch your money off quicker than you can say “two-tier policing”.
I’ve started hoardin’ cash. Proper hoardin’. Under floorboards, in old coffee jars, behind the water tank. The missus thinks I’ve lost the plot. Maybe I have. But when the lights go out and the screens go blank and some robot voice says “This transaction has been blocked for your safety”, I’ll still be able to buy a bottle of Jameson and twenty Rothmans with a creased twenty that doesn’t give a toss about my social-credit score.
Call me paranoid. Call me a dinosaur. Just don’t come cryin’ to me when you’re lined up outside the Jobcentre with a dead phone and no way to buy a bag of chips because your digital wallet’s been paused for “inappropriate memes”.
The final nail’s comin’, lads. And when they hammer it in, the coffin lid slams shut on the last little bit of freedom we had left.
Hide your cash. Learn to barter. And if anyone asks for your Digital ID, tell ’em Big Bastard Bob sent you, and to shove it where the sun don’t shine.
Chapter 5 next: “The Smart Fridge That Grassed Me Up to the Missus for Eatin’ All the Cheese”
Keep a roll of twenties in the freezer next to the peas. They’ll never look there.
Big Bastard Bob
Cash still king
This is a sample from the book Modern Bollocks, available to buy now on Smashwords
The Knobfather out May 11th 2026