Comment on: 'Dearly beloved...fight'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/09/arguments-over-wills-lucy-mangan
Wills are a sort of socially acceptable bribery, giving people things so that they might remember you fondly. Or at all. Because let's face it, for many people their greatest achievement is that at least they were never successfully prosecuted for engaging in an act of self-pollution in front of the wet fish counter at Morrisons.
Leaving vast sums to good causes is seen as eccentric, and The English admire eccentricity. God alone knows there's little enough to be proud of if you're English these days, so that's the way to play it, be proud of the little things. The problem is one of prohibitions on pride; one is not allowed to be proud of the things that made England great, like toil, a rigid class system, heavy machinery, the smell of swarfega and the simple application of a water cooled, belt fed machine shotgun to quell a civil disturbance. Now, essentially, one has to rely on made up stuff, like Marmite. Reading about somebody giving away money you had no chance of inheriting has exactly the same comforting sensation as dissolving a rollo under your tongue.
And it's rare, because arranging Revenge From Beyond The Grave is well beyond the capabilities of most people. (Unless you're Doctor Phibes, or Major Gander C.B., T.D.)
Folk have enough trouble organising their lives on a day by day basis, even when they are there to make informed decisions in real time, so for the majority of people death is a disadvantage bordering on disability. Part of the problem may be a sense of perspective, if you are the sort of person who displays grief of operatic proportions just because your supermarket no longer stocks your favourite flavour of packet soup, then chances are you are unlikely to maintain the focus needed to be able to devise a fittingly fiendish plot against anyone you consider ever even slightly slighted you.
And that is what a great will is all about - not the simple option of working out what your grasping relatives really, really don't like, then leaving all your money to the society for the advancement of vegetarianism or something equally bloody pointless and, when the will is read to them, having a photograph of their shocked and sick faces taken and e mailed to you at your.name@afterlife.co.uk (look, if God is an Englishman, it stands to reason that heaven will have a .co.uk address, right?) because hey, you never know, and what fun to see the disappointed faces, like the ultimate satisfying Antiques Roadshow moments, when prim and greedy people are told that their priceless po that Queen Victoria was said to have tinkled in is obviously a fake - but something sweetly complex.
A great will should set a series of tasks and labours for your feckless relatives through which they will learn lessons about life, each other, the true nature of what is valuable and that you can't put a price on happiness, the true test of which will be whether they stab the solicitor to death with his own fountain pen in a spite-fuelled explosion of rage when, with a smile, he reveals that yes, they now inherit...but that all your wealth was spent on financing the quirky tasks recently performed and that the sum total of the estate is now a single saucy seaside postcard found at the back of your desk.
Wills can be a tricky thing, as can making one. Possibly that's why a made up statistic of people who should have wills have yet to make them. It could be that they don't know how to divide their spoils; for instance you want to be fair and hence divide your collection of classic seventies porn mags evenly between your three nieces, but at the same time hate the idea of breaking up the collection. Much more likely is you just think you're immortal. That's why 'make a will...NOW' posters should be placed prominently at places where we have a brush with mortality and death can feel nearer than normal, like a doctor's waiting room, an aeroplane encountering turbulence or the check out line at Ikea.
Wills are a sort of socially acceptable bribery, giving people things so that they might remember you fondly. Or at all. Because let's face it, for many people their greatest achievement is that at least they were never successfully prosecuted for engaging in an act of self-pollution in front of the wet fish counter at Morrisons.
Leaving vast sums to good causes is seen as eccentric, and The English admire eccentricity. God alone knows there's little enough to be proud of if you're English these days, so that's the way to play it, be proud of the little things. The problem is one of prohibitions on pride; one is not allowed to be proud of the things that made England great, like toil, a rigid class system, heavy machinery, the smell of swarfega and the simple application of a water cooled, belt fed machine shotgun to quell a civil disturbance. Now, essentially, one has to rely on made up stuff, like Marmite. Reading about somebody giving away money you had no chance of inheriting has exactly the same comforting sensation as dissolving a rollo under your tongue.
And it's rare, because arranging Revenge From Beyond The Grave is well beyond the capabilities of most people. (Unless you're Doctor Phibes, or Major Gander C.B., T.D.)
Folk have enough trouble organising their lives on a day by day basis, even when they are there to make informed decisions in real time, so for the majority of people death is a disadvantage bordering on disability. Part of the problem may be a sense of perspective, if you are the sort of person who displays grief of operatic proportions just because your supermarket no longer stocks your favourite flavour of packet soup, then chances are you are unlikely to maintain the focus needed to be able to devise a fittingly fiendish plot against anyone you consider ever even slightly slighted you.
And that is what a great will is all about - not the simple option of working out what your grasping relatives really, really don't like, then leaving all your money to the society for the advancement of vegetarianism or something equally bloody pointless and, when the will is read to them, having a photograph of their shocked and sick faces taken and e mailed to you at your.name@afterlife.co.uk (look, if God is an Englishman, it stands to reason that heaven will have a .co.uk address, right?) because hey, you never know, and what fun to see the disappointed faces, like the ultimate satisfying Antiques Roadshow moments, when prim and greedy people are told that their priceless po that Queen Victoria was said to have tinkled in is obviously a fake - but something sweetly complex.
A great will should set a series of tasks and labours for your feckless relatives through which they will learn lessons about life, each other, the true nature of what is valuable and that you can't put a price on happiness, the true test of which will be whether they stab the solicitor to death with his own fountain pen in a spite-fuelled explosion of rage when, with a smile, he reveals that yes, they now inherit...but that all your wealth was spent on financing the quirky tasks recently performed and that the sum total of the estate is now a single saucy seaside postcard found at the back of your desk.
Wills can be a tricky thing, as can making one. Possibly that's why a made up statistic of people who should have wills have yet to make them. It could be that they don't know how to divide their spoils; for instance you want to be fair and hence divide your collection of classic seventies porn mags evenly between your three nieces, but at the same time hate the idea of breaking up the collection. Much more likely is you just think you're immortal. That's why 'make a will...NOW' posters should be placed prominently at places where we have a brush with mortality and death can feel nearer than normal, like a doctor's waiting room, an aeroplane encountering turbulence or the check out line at Ikea.
Labels: CiF, Comment is free, England, Guardian, Lucy mangan, Wills
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