Reports that bereaved relatives struggle with the unsympathetic practices of banks and utility and tech companies struck a chord. After the formulaic “we’re sorry for your loss” when you first contact them, you encounter the familiar modern miseries of call waiting, opaque documentation and unreachable representatives. Companies slow walk through procedures, as if it is somehow respectful to move at funereal pace, when what your want is to get this dreary stuff done. Archaic and cumbersome methods are sometimes demanded – hard copies, snail mail, in-person meetings, notarised letters.
The worst offenders were bookmakers. My father, who liked to bet on the horses, backed the winner of the Grand National just before he went into hospital for the last time, but it required the completion of multi-page forms and several calls and emails even to establish that he had a balance in his account, before the sum of £70 was finally released – the company having first got the bank details wrong – some months later. It’s almost as if they didn’t want to let go of the money at all.
Spoiling the fun
Where to start with the news that Rochdale council has postponed drag queen reading events at its libraries? It did so after similar events in Britain and the United States – in San Francisco, in Reading, in Bexleyheath – have been disrupted by angry mobs, who, uninhibited by the presence of small children, proclaim that the people reading them stories are “paedophiles” and “nonces”.
It is an issue where the US neo-fascists the Proud Boys have found common cause with posters on Mumsnet, the UK website for parents. These events are not about “sexualising” or “grooming” children. Mostly they are harmless fun, obviously in the tradition of pantomime, Shakespeare and Rochdale’s cross-dressing star Norman Evans, also known as Fanny Fairbottom, who performed and broadcast in the far-off, pre-woke days of the 1940s and 50s.
If they send a message, it is that there are numerous ways of expressing your gender, which will be affirming for non-conforming children and hopefully help others grow into tolerant and understanding adults. Perhaps most striking is that the sort of people who make these protests are the ones most likely to complain about being silenced. What is the banning of drag queen story reading if not cancel culture?
Laughter amid tears
It’s August and I’d love to find an upbeat story in these times of drought, disease and destruction. Is it that Gordon Brown has turned out to be sane and considered (if retired) politician, motivated by the public interest? Possibly. I’m moderately cheered by an item reporting that the French government requires new commercial buildings to have greenery or at least solar panels on their roofs, but it turns out this is not very new news.
The most fun that events gave me last week was the virtuoso trolling by the Ukrainian ministry of defence of the Russian government, after unexplained explosions wreaked havoc on the Saky airbase in Crimea. “Don’t smoke in dangerous places,” advised the defence minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, drily. The ministry later released a catchy little video that teased the Russians who cut short their trips to beaches near the blasts about choosing to holiday in occupied land. They could have chosen Dubai, Turkey, Cuba, it pointed out, but “you chose Crimea”.
It’s not that funny, given that we’re talking about a brutal war, but you have to take your schadenfreude where you can.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture correspondent
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