I got in late the other night and checked my mail. There was an ominous brown envelope, the kind you get when they’re after you. I walked upstairs to my flat trembling and summoned up the courage to open it.

Instead of a demand or a summons to attend a meeting to explain myself there was a cheque, attached to an explanation that through PAYE and not through self assessment ( which I no longer do) I had paid too much.

It just sat there on my dining table and I thought “that’s a cheque, I haven’t one of them for ages” – because I haven’t.

The next day was busy and I worried in the back of my head how I use to pay cheques into my bank with First Direct. It was before I had a couple of brain haemorrhages in November 2024. Finally I remembered I used to pay into a post office or an HSBC bank. I checked (no pun) to find out where one was. I live in the City, it must be easy. I live in Blackfriars, holy smoke the nearest one was nearly a mile away near the top of Chantry Lane.

I decided to set aside the lunchbreak. I set out at 1pm across the busy Ludgate Circus , past the world’s big lawyers (Dentons where my mate works) and to the HSBC at the top of Fetter Lane.  I went in (scared) and there was a man who pointed me to the back of the bank , past the army of machines staring angrily at me for not using them.

There at the back was a queue of old people with cheques in their hands. We waited our turn, we filled out paying in slips. I was frozen from the walk and found it hard to find the numbers on the back of my banker’s card. I remembered something called a cheque book.

When I gave my cheque and the paper slip to the lady behind the glass protecting her she smiled kindly, that look young people give those with grey hair. She couldn’t read my writing as she keyed my details into her slip, I had to give her my card, she re did my zeros with a cross across the circles saying zero.

Finally she said she’d found me, I was real because my account matched what I had declared about myself. The cheque from HMRC is now making its way into money paid into my account so I can have a free trip to Scotland to be with my brothers in Kinloch Rannoch – on the tax man.

Well that’s not quite right. I’d overpaid my tax and found the cheque and opened the envelope and found and gone to the bank and will today be the richer.

I’ll find out all that on my First Direct app which I was told I could have used to pay the cheque in. The lady in the bank told me that the next time I should have used the picture of the cheque I took and sent the photo using the app and paid the money in that way.

Then I thought of an even better way! HMRC had taken the money out of my pay and worked out that they’d done it automatically. Couldn’t they have knocked the amount they charged me through my tax code? They know my bank details, I normally pay them extra every year, I haven’t changed my bank account this century. Could they not have paid it digitally into my bank account?

I thought I’d ask my reader – why does HMRC send cheques by post? Do they really trust the Royal Mail? Do they trust these valuable cheques from getting knicked or thrown away?  How many of these cheques get thrown away , the envelopes thrown away with all the nonsense that comes out of compliance with some banking regulation?

I think there should be a better way to pay me my tax back than sending me a cheque and though I’m grateful for the money wonder if I’ve got more HMRC cheques that never made it – the lucky way this one did – to the bank!

Press on past the pop ups that the Bank website will offer you.

Press on, press on , if you press hard enough – you will find this picture!

There are people who still work in banks like First Direct’s owner – HSBC!