Grief is the price we pay for love, the late Queen wisely said; but for many of her subjects, their actual income is the price to pay for grief. Aspects of normal life have been suspended, but no one has yet found a way to cancel or pause the cost of living crisis, a peril without recent precedent. What happens when an abrupt national event collides with an economy defined by insecurity and declining wages: well, more misery and hardship? But amid the mourning for the Queen, few people want to talk about that.
“Now is not the time,” decree the self-appointed grief police. Perhaps someone should inform one casualty, let’s call her Helena, that now is not the time to complain about her partner being ignominiously tossed from a Royal residence on to the scrapheap. “My partner was let go from work at Windsor Castle last Friday with no notice just because of mourning,” she tells me. As a contracted out construction worker, he was given no advance warning, simply ordered to make the site secure and then leave. Helena understands that many wish to mourn: “But for a young family this has put us in dire straits, and I feel resentment as this is nothing to do with us: I have respect for the death of an old lady but that’s about it, we still need to eat.”
