The year 2011 will be the one when you start to at last see the benefits of the banking crisis. That might seem hard to accept now, but believe me, as you slowly come to accept that it is the '80s again, small blessings will be revealed, and the best of them will be the re-emergence of travellers cheques as a unit of currency.

There was a time when the travellers cheque was king. The banking boom ruined all that. They made banking too easy. Online services and hole-in-the-wall machines ruined a vital part of the holiday experience. With them gone, holidays will return to the complicated, worrying and difficult experiences they were always meant to be.

Back then, holidays started months before you travelled. There was the lunchtime trip to a travel agent, a brochure then left tantalisingly open on your desk and the barbed comments of co-workers saying things like "Oh, I see you're going on holiday!" You knew they were hurt and envious, and that was how you wanted them.

Weeks later their suffering would intensify when you arrived back late from lunch with a huge white travel agent's envelope. It would contain massively sized and complicated looking tickets that would make reference to the Warsaw Convention and terms and conditions that ran into volumes. "My tickets!" you'd declare, biting your lower lip in mock excitement.

But the crème de la crème of the pre-holiday experience was the trip to the bank to pick up the travellers cheques. This often involved time off work as banks didn't do lunch hours and generally it was better to ring ahead to be safe: "Hello, I'm going on holiday, I just wanted to check you have pesetas, and lots of them. I'll be gone six days, so I'm going to need a hell of a lot."

In the bank it was essential to see if the bank teller's eyes flinched when she heard how many pesetas you wanted. If she didn't react, you probably hadn't enough. After that was the signing process, done in front of her with your passport open, and after that there was the speech about keeping the cheque numbers and the cheques separate at all times.

This speech would haunt your waking hours until you returned home from the trip. In Spain you would hide the numbers in a crawl space in the air conditioner, but still lie awake at night, convinced that someone knew where they were. You couldn't spend those cheques fast enough.

Or you could spend them too fast. You'd cash your first cheque at the airport in Dublin and have nothing left from it by the time you needed money for the taxi from the airport in Spain.

The taxi driver's refusal to cash a cheque would require you to wake the hotel manager at 3am. You'd budget for a month, but they'd be gone in two days.

Well, not quite gone, you have two, but they are both for £2. You survive three days eating only white bread and drinking aftershave. You walk home from Dublin airport but are quick to report on Monday morning that you've just had the holiday of a lifetime.

The boomtime stole holidays like that from us: the recession is bringing them back, mister! All hail the recession!