Mark Andrews on Saturday: What's in a name, Raab's fighting talk, and the pitfalls of a cashless society

Supermarkets are encouraging people to pay for their shopping by card during the coronavirus outbreak, which makes a lot of sense.

It is far safer to insert a card into a machine located some distance from the checkout operator than handing over a wad of potentially contaminated cash and fumbling while they give you the change.

The worry is though that people will get out of the habit of using notes and coins once the epidemic is over, accelerating the trend towards a cashless society.

Now, of course for some young people, that is already with us. They virtually never handle money, and even the smallest of transactions are carried out either by card or by mobile phone.

But while a cashless society may sound convenient, the implications could be far more wide-reaching.

A cashless society means the only place where anybody can store their money is in a bank. Do we really want to hand that much power to the banks? They would be free to charge negative interest rates, impose ever more punitive bank charges, and we would not be able to do anything about it because we've got nowhere else to go.

A cashless society may sound terribly alluring and modern, but we really should be careful what we wish for.

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Police in New York arrested a woman for failing to adhere to social-distancing rules. They then locked her in a cell with 24 other prisoners for 36 hours, before finally releasing her. They don't seem to have got the hang of this preventing the spread of infection lark, do they?

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Dominic Raab says Boris Johnson will make a full recovery from coronavirus because he is 'a fighter'.

I hope he is right, but if the Prime Minister does make a speedy recovery, it will be down to a number of factors, including his general health, the severity of the virus, and the care he receives, rather than any personal stoicism.

I'm sure Mr Raab meant well, but did it never occur to him his words could be construed as saying those who have died lacked the 'fight' to get through it? Something that seems particularly insensitive given all the doctors and nurses who lost their lives after putting themselves in harm's way.

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We all know choosing a name for a child is a bit of a minefield these days, but new mother Preeti Verma has not handled it terribly well.

She named her newborn twins Corona and Covid, to remind her in years to come of what was happening at the time of their birth. Now I would have thought you would have to be pretty dim to forget your children were born at the time of a global pandemic, but either way, I don't envy those kids having to go through life named after a virus. I suspect their period of social isolation could be very long indeed.