There is a weariness to my moods these days. It weighs most heavily when I take a backward glance at my past and it sits in my mind’s eye just for a few seconds alongside the present, like one of those ‘then and now’ photo features.
Like many folk, when I stopped earning, your state pension becomes a sharp reminder that life has changed and unexpected expenses you used to wince at before can now force a dramatic rethink on so many different aspects of your life.
When you are confronted with an unavoidable bill, you take the matter very seriously, weighing up what steps you will need to take before you start finding that all important tradesman. But that financial worry and anxiety is added to by the process of trying to find someone willing to take your money.
I’m sure it wasn’t always like this. We are facing a roof repair and I’m expecting this is not going to be a small change job. Over the past fortnight we have contacted a good number of firms, some more than once. Out of that total, only one has replied, and that was to say the job was of no interest.
My money is as good as the next person’s, so is business booming to such an extent that we have now gone from the capitalist dream of cost-effective competition to over-priced monopolies? Keeping the customer satisfied seems to be in the past, as does respecting those who trust you enough to hand over their hard-earned, or rationed, cash.
How, and when, did the world I once know change so much?
And that brings me to the real downer.
I’m not organised enough to plan decades ahead, and neither is my wife, so when the decision came to draw up our will and testament, it was one made in the shadow of human frailty and finality. Obviously, you hope this document will stay safely sealed for a long time to come but, realistically, we know it is something that needs doing… now.
On a personal level, a lawyer’s office is not a place I have frequented. I’ve had numerous professional engagements with the legal world but, on a personal face-to-face level, they have been very rare occasions.
The last time I visited our family’s legal firm, which seems to have been in operation since the days of quills and candles, had to be more than 20 years ago. Then it was with my mother and, if I remember correctly, something to do with deeds and, as was her wont, ensuring all her official paperwork was in order. A trait I never inherited.
I remember the visit clearly. The sparkling woodwork and fragrance of furniture polish. The clicking of keyboards, the atmosphere of quiet efficiency, the ambiance of a learned profession, aloof from the mundane modern world outside.
I didn’t find it intimidating, but reassuring. A world of knowledge, dignity and timeless decorum.
And decades later I was back, standing outside the door. All the shops in the street were locked up on this weekday afternoon, the brass name plaques needed polished, the door needed varnished, and it was locked. When we made the appointment we were warned we might have to knock.
The office seemed silent as the knock echoed through the building. There were no keyboards clicking, no telephones ringing, just silence.
It took a while but the solicitor duly unlocked the door and we stepped inside. It was empty; not just empty, it felt abandoned.
“Ah, Mr and Mrs Morkis,” said the solicitor. “I’ll be with you in a minute, please take a seat.”
He gestured to a small place under the staircase while he went of to fetch the necessary papers.
So this was it? Our will and testament, our final legal act while of sound mind. Signing off from our lives, and signing away all we had at the end of a journey we had made together.
This was the solemnity of the occasion. A small table covered by a plastic 'cloth', opposite a broken office chair, a rust-stained, leak-damaged radiator, under a flight of stairs, in an empty office.
When he returned with those all-important and pricey documents, word for word the same as my late mother’s but with my name instead of hers, I wasn’t expecting parchment but I have a heavier stock of copy paper from Home Bargains for my desktop printer.
We duly signed the pages and were ushered back out on to an empty street, and the door closed behind us, and on our lives, at least legally.
That was it.
I am made to feel of more value at a supermarket checkout. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that. Did I really expect to be treated differently from someone looking for legal representation for a forthcoming breach of the peace case? Yes, I did.
This was a solemn moment of finalising the paperwork that would act as the bridge between our deaths and those left behind. At least that how we both saw it. It was a jolt to realise we were just an irrelevant broken-down couple in a broken Britain.
It would have been more satisfying to scrawl my last wishes on the back of an abandoned cigarette packet while having a tea and a Kit Kat in a transport cafe.
As you get older, there are so many areas where you feel, or are made to feel, worthless and insignificant.
This was certainly one of them.
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