The slang term for a fifty pound note is bullseye, but I’ve never actually heard anyone use it, and why would I? You can’t actually spend a bullseye anywhere.

At the end of 1994, the average price of a pint of beer in the UK was £1.61. Thirty years later, it’s £4.82. You’d be lucky to pay that in London, but it’s not impossible, and I know a few places that still sell pints for under a fiver.

Thirty years ago, you could have paid for that beer with a £20 note, but no one accepted £50 notes. The cost of inadvertently accepting a counterfeit was too high.

However, today’s £50 doesn’t even buy you as many pints (10) as £20 did in 1995 (12) and yet it’s still the case that no one is willing to accept a £50 note. Even with all the new security features in the weird plastic banknotes, no one trusts them enough to take them as payment.

Somehow, £50 has remained anchored in the public consciousness as a dangerously large sum of money. Even as the price of beer has trebled, and the price of a house has more than quintupled, people haven’t noticed that a £50 note doesn’t actually buy you all that much any more.

And that’s why I’ve been carrying around two £50 notes for months, waiting for the elusive convenient moment when I happen to pass a bank branch that is still operating and is open for business at that time.