The first plastic five-pound note issued recently by the Bank of England was heralded with fanfare. Made with a transparent PP film, it was claimed to be cleaner, safer, stronger and harder to copy, though after initial tests the bank acknowledged the material was “susceptible to high temperatures.”

True to the motto that the proof is in the pudding, or in this case the polymer, jokesters quickly proved that even plastic has its limits. Just like the likenesses the notes bear – in England Winston Churchill and in Scotland the new Forth Bridge, in which a tiny crack kept Edinburgh and Fife apart for weeks.

First to get their hands on the plastic, Londoners unsuccessfully tried ripping it or drowning it. A spin in an ordinary clothes dryer shrank it, but post-Brexit Britons are now used to a shrinking pound. Apparently, few had money to burn, though the owner of a burger van twittered that he’d accidently melted one on the grill.

An experiment by the manager of a printing centre near Glasgow was more daring. With time on his hands, Stuart McLean diligently wiped the Scottish note almost totally clean of ink, leaving only security numbers and the see-through hologram. To the annoyance of some of his fellow countrymen, he could not rub out the word England.