There’s more to Miss Shilling than formality and politeness

There is something quite poignant about the drop-down list of alternative forms of address that the computer offers when you shop online: Mrs, Lady, Dr, Professor… There was a time, I suppose, when I might have become any of those. Instead I am Miss, and likely to remain so.

Not (apart from a pang of regret for the learned Professor Shilling who dwelt at the end of a path not taken) that I don’t cherish my spinster’s handle. Since my aunt was ordained and became the Reverend, I am the only Miss Shilling in my immediate family, and I cherish both the lingering girlish overtones of Miss (Ms, avaunt!) and my membership of an excellent company of women, both fictional and real – Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, the “spinsters innumerable” of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, and my formidable university moral tutor, Miss Bruten – for whom “Miss” was less a signifier of marital status than a breastplate of identity.

While I am Miss Shilling to the online shopkeepers, it is rare for anyone to call me that in real life. But as time goes on, I may have to get used to it, for last week Mr Justice Hayden, presiding over a case involving an elderly woman with dementia, told lawyers that she should be referred to in court as “Mrs”, adding, “I profoundly dislike the way hospitals infantilise senior citizens by referring to them by their first name.”

In my childhood, the use of someone’s given name was a mark of real intimacy. My grandmothers always called each other Mrs Charlton and Mrs Shilling (never Ethel and Nelly); and although my old headmistress annually sends me a Christmas card signed with her first name, I still think of her as Mrs Turner.

The unaccustomed use of a formal title can lead to a startling readjustment of perception. When my son mentioned that he is known as “Mr Shilling” at the school where he works, I was taken aback: my boy a Mister? Really? Suddenly I saw him as a stranger might – a young man with experience and authority. Mr Justice Hayden expresses a profound truth: the way we address people matters. When age or infirmity has stripped us of dignity, the right to courtesy must remain intact.

The Tarpeian rock is a Roman cliff from which, in ancient times, seditious types used to be hurled to their death. Over the centuries the site has become a touch neglected, but the fashion house of Gucci is poised to give it a stylish makeover. What better moment for a revamp of our own former places of execution? The Gothic imagination of the house of Mcqueen could draw inspiration from the restless shades of Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas Wyatt, once incarcerated in the Tower of London, while Tyburn – the former showground of public torture, now a howling traffic junction – is surely ripe for redevelopment as a London Fashion Week catwalk, with an installation of killer chic tricoteuses in the FROW.

Once, the elderly would flee the city for a peaceful rural retirement. Now, according to the estate agents Hamptons, millennials are flocking to the countryside, attracted by cheaper property prices. This is good news for rural schools, churches, shops and pubs; more problematic for cities, whose fecund hipsters have decamped, leaving wealthy oldsters and the struggling young eyeing each other with misgiving across the social void.