NS&I

Working out the Kinks American singer and vegan activist Moby called the Kinks’ song ‘Lola’ ‘transphobic’ and ‘unevolved’. According to the band, the song was based on a real incident when their manager, Robert Wace, spent the night dancing with a cross-dressing man in a bar in Paris, was alerted to the stubble on his dancing partner’s chin but replied that he was ‘too drunk to care’. The band admitted they did attract such attention because of their name, which was supposedly inspired by their dress sense. As for the name Lola, it had different connotations at the time, as the name of a racing car marque which featured in

I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that National Savings and Investments (NS&I) began life in 1861 as the Post Office Savings Bank and is still an offshoot of HM Treasury. It survives as a supposedly low-risk choice, in an increasingly hard-sell marketplace, for those who wish to put money aside for old age or their heirs. So it is peculiarly disappointing to learn that NS&I has been caught mishandling some £476 million of savings belonging to 37,500 deceased customers. The story so far is of incompetence rather than malfeasance, compounded by cover-up and (with echoes of Fujitsu’s role in the Post Office scandal) overreliance on a longstanding IT contractor,