My local post office is one of four on Sydney’s lower north shore scheduled for closure before Christmas, and everybody I speak to is unhappy about it. Thus far the protest organised by local shops and residents has taken the form of a letterbox drop (irony) and an online petition. But if they were really serious they would launch what could be the biggest class action in Australian history. While writing the Yes campaign for the Marriage Equality postal vote in 2017 (a sin for which I hope Speccie readers have now forgiven me), I learnt that most Australians under the age of twenty-five have never sent or received a letter and are more likely to have gender-affirming surgery than enter a post office. For their grandparents’ generation, however, post offices are a vital and irreplaceable resource. Where else in the post-Amazon, postDoorDash world can they take part in that once ubiquitous community bonding ritual the Slow-moving Queue? Where else can they give their views on tattoos and transgenderism to a complete stranger without fear of censure? Where else can they take delivery of correspondence and purchases which they don’t want their spouses to discover in their hard drive or sock drawer? Where else can they find, between the same four walls, a Write-your-own-Will Kit, a 1000-piece Banksia jigsaw and a roll of bubble wrap?  Where else, for that matter, can they stand looking at shelf stock for an hour with no obligation to purchase? For many of Australia’s increasingly secular and health-conscious elderly, post offices have taken the place of churches and pubs, and closing them is a prima facie case of institutional ageism. It will also impact other demographics in ways which have clearly not been anticipated. Denied their daily post office hit, some old people will be forced to slow down the queues at airline check-in counters and cinema box offices. Others will be forced to subject young people on public transport to their post-war opinions, triggering unprecedented levels of micro-aggression. And our courts will be swamped by a tsunami of late-onset divorce proceedings and will disputation. The problem, of course, is that the vast majority of those being so cruelly discriminated against are not only old, but also English-speaking and white. So the protest to which I have added my signature is probably less likely to succeed than if its object was to bring back flogging (watch this space). Rather than invest more time and effort in gestures of Canutish futility, then, perhaps we should settle for giving this once great pillar of suburban Australian life a dignified send-off. That is, recommission a decommissioned Australian Army bugler to stand outside every condemned branch at 3.30pm on the day of its closure and play the ‘Last Post’.

A protest even more certain to fail is the one which has persuaded people to march through the centres of democratically governed American cities waving ‘No King’ banners.  If anything, comparing the Trump administration to a constitutional monarchy will only strengthen support for Mr Trump in middle America, most of whose population have been martyrs to buyers’ remorse since 1783. Wannabe White House dynasties like the Roosevelts, Bushes and Clintons never quite cut the mustard, and the scion of the only family deemed ersatz royalty turned out to be so incapable of keeping his pants on that the late Christopher Hitchens referred to his tenure as ‘The first Johnson administration’. But the popularity of shows like The Crown suggests that the US appetite for British royalty is undiminished, and it will be interesting to see if the man who at time of writing is still Prince Andrew is made as welcome there as every other bad Windsor apple has been since Edward VIII.

It was the poor behaviour of Andrew and his ex-wife which gave me the idea, thirty-three years ago, for an Australian sitcom called Queen’s Land. The premise of this show was that a last-straw royal scandal had provoked a UK referendum, the outcome of which was that the entire family, now redundant and homeless, has been persuaded by a Queensland property magnate to front the marketing of his latest Gold Coast McMansion development in exchange for rent-free accommodation in perpetuity. If as yet unseen revelations about the relationships of Andrew and Fergie with Epstein prove as damaging as some have suggested, I might blow the dust off that script. For added contemporary relevance I’d have to change the title, of course, and I might even move the action 1,000 kilometres south and put the NSW cadastral division of King County on the map.