Now I'll admit Halloween didn't play an important part in my childhood. There was the occasional flame lit pumpkin lantern used to scare unsuspecting neighbours but on the whole it was a bit 'foreign' and was just a part of the build up to the main event a week later - the very British Guy Fawkes night. Times have changed. Any parent will tell you that for many children and some adults, Halloween parties and trick or treating have become the main autumn event. Wherever you look this week there will be ghouls and zombies.

Our fascination with the 'undead' means there will undoubtedly be special Halloween episodes of some of the more adult cartoons and no doubt there will be reruns of movies like Shaun of the Dead or Zombie Apocalypse.

I'm not an expert but the premise of many of these films seems to be that the zombies are unrecognizable as such until such time as they seek to wreak their revenge on the unsuspecting living. In one film I saw recently they were drinking alongside a group of people in a bar until something triggered off a rampage.

Now of course such plots suspend reality, but up to the point they revealed their true nature I was fooled. I hadn't paid too much attention to the title, 'World's End', and their behaviour had been normal. They had, of course bought a round of drinks like any other group of friends in a pub and, like 90 percent of humans in this situation, had paid in cash. But what if it had been a cashless society? How would a zombie, without the appropriate ID and presumably being registered dead, open a bank account or open a line of credit. They would be in the world but without cash payments they would be not 'a part of it'. In fact they would stand out a mile. Bar scenes and zombies seemingly behaving normally would surely be a thing of the past. As they become less credible would this spell the end for such movies and cartoons and, being outside public view would they soon be forgotten? Would the end of cash mean the end of Halloween as we know it?

In the same way that the mobile phone has made it almost impossible to write a credible crime novel - think of Poirot in a world of texting and the Internet - so the absence of cash makes the undead (even?) less believable. I suppose it depends how you look at it, will a cashless society destroy your parties or your nightmares?

Or at least that's what I thought until my wife pointed out that World's End is actually about Aliens and not zombies and that zombies don't drink! OK, so forget about the alien thing, what if there was a zombie apocalypse? While I am pretty sure zombies cannot be returned to “life”, they are also “undead”, rather than “dead”. So, they may not have had their accounts frozen. But honestly, I’m really not sure about this. It still seems, in this case, that cash would be better, if only because a zombie would likely have difficulty entering their own PIN at a card terminal, any biometric gating their smart phone payment would likely fail due to tissue degradation in short order, and don’t even talk to me about aligning bar codes for an Ali-payment but I doubt this would delay their relentless pursuit of destruction. Of course, as society began to disintegrate so it would become impossible to use or accept such digital payment mechanisms. Would the world descend into anarchy and looting without a means of exchange? Or would a semblance of reality be preserved by the use of cash? Would notes and coins save us from the chaos of the Cashless Apocalypse and enable the slow regeneration of society as we know it?

Be safe at Halloween and remember the zombies are the ones who aren't drinking.