Death of the maiden name

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/17/death-maiden-name-mortgage-application

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I opened my first bank account in 1981. It was a NatWest child’s savings account, the kind that rewarded its customers with an ugly porcelain pig every time they hit a savings goal. I deposited a pound that my grandad had given me – a whole pound! I felt like a millionaire – and when I was 18, I graduated to the adult version of the account. Somewhere in there, I got rid of the pigs.

Since then, I have had many bank and building society accounts, and the security drill has always been the same: date of birth, proof of address, national insurance or, in the US, social security number and, for identity purposes, mother’s maiden name. And so I was curious this week to note that one of these questions, which I have been uniformly answering since 1981, has been dropped.

Now and then, a neutral indicator comes along to confirm an aspect of social change one has latterly only intuited. Without looking at the data, most of us have a sense that as many people get divorced as stay married these days and that single parenthood is on the rise. Clearly, fewer women take their husband’s surname than used to.

The extent to which these changes have rolled out from progressives to the population at large can be measured in tiny, real-world adjustments of the kind I stumbled across this week while applying for a mortgage. US mortgages are an onerous affair, requiring endless reams of paperwork and last-minute applications for credit cards to boost one’s credit score. (The US credit rating system is a Kafkaesque nightmare wherein, for example, the very act of having your credit checked negatively affects your credit. You could potentially run yourself into the ground just by applying to enough agencies for credit, without ever spending a dime.)

Anyway, in the course of all this I have been required to open new accounts and reset the security on old ones, and no one – not a bank, brokerage or credit card company – has asked for my mother’s maiden name. The question was either bypassed altogether, in favour of “the street where you grew up”, or those questions I avoid since the replies are so variable, such as what’s your favourite colour, or name your best friend (instant regression to school-age dithering: is it X or is it Y? Depends on how I’m feeling).

Related: What are they trying to do to Prince George – turn him into Pinocchio? | Peter Bradshaw

Twice I was asked for my “maternal grandmother’s maiden name”, which makes sense generationally, but gave me pause. When my own children are 18, the entire concept of maiden names may well be a relic.

Meanwhile, the NatWest pigs. I just Googled them and apparently they’re worth £100. Some things are worth hanging on to.

Tunnelling into my heart

The escape of the notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán-Loera at the weekend comes hot on the heels of the escape, last month, of two convicted murderers from a New York state prison. All three tunnelled their way to freedom, but while Richard Matt and David Sweat were both shot – one killed and one apprehended – El Chapo is still on the run.

Like most drug lords, he sounds like a highly disagreeable individual. And yet. Call it the Shawshank effect, or the memory of the Tamworth Two, those plucky pigs who escaped from an abattoir in Wiltshire 20 years ago, or the bone-deep resonance of all those Clint Eastwood westerns, but it is almost impossible to read about a fugitive and not experience a tiny surge of hope that they make it. You wouldn’t want El Chapo knocking on your door. But in spite of yourself, you might cheer him on.