Hong Kong and cash go hand in hand in innumerable ways. Cash is the only way to pay when hammering home a deal on cutting edge electronics sold in the city’s back lanes and byways. The scent of gold shops lingers in the humid air, and anyone who’s not keen to deal with you in cash is probably intent on selling you one of its financial synonyms - an Octopus SmartCard, perhaps – which you can ‘top up’ at ATM-like machines and then use to pay your way in virtually every situation: from the famous Star Ferry to the underground system to the supermarket to the ubiquitous 7-11s that litter the streets.

Banks themselves are big-hitting behemoths here, with their gilt lettering, glittering reams of crystal and golden-hued lighting concepts as opulent as Versailles.

But it’s the Hong Kong dollar in its plain old form that I have fallen in love with. The cold, hard cash, pure and simple. Except that turns out not to be so cold or hard at all.

The money here is silly money. Silly, wonderful, playful, feel-good-when-you-touch-it money. It’s downright whimsical. The colours on the notes are as over the top as Carmen Miranda’s headwear: red lions in shades of super-saturated cherry; blue fish so ocean-bright they make the sea seem pallid; and the outrageous cacophony of purple stripes and geometric patterns that spreads across the ten dollar note like a port wine stain on a baby.

The silver two-dollar coins have twirly little edges like cookie-cutters do, and some of the tiniest denominations are weeny brass coins that look like magic elfen money from a time now past.

This would all be charming enough as is, but here’s the kicker: the notes are not uniform. Each time you get a twenty or a fifty or a one hundred, its design will differ from the designs of the notes you already hold. This is because banks in Hong Kong all issue their own notes with individual designs on them, rather than one uniform set of currency being released by the state.

I told you those banks were big-hitting behemoths.