Death and Diesel

I had to get up early this morning because a big diesel delivery was coming in and 320 litres of what was on the back of the lorry was ours. In other marinas there are boats that act as floating petrol pumps and which hitch up alongside you and fill your tanks. Our marina can’t have that because the only way in and out of here is via a passage through a complicated bridge. The bridge is owned by the Canal and River Trust and is mostly broken. Occasionally, when enough people need to get in from or out to the main body of the Thames, they send someone out to fiddle about with it and hordes of boats get stuck in a big traffic jam. Cars also get stuck because it’s a swing bridge which is one of the main routes in and out of the Isle of Dogs. It’s ridiculously impractical, but short of retraining as a bridge engineer or gifting the Canal and River Trust huge sums of money, we have to work around it.

The diesel that comes on the lorry is delivered in large cardboard boxes, like the worst sort of wine - ‘I’m getting hints of tarmac and a backwash of fossil fuel. Think environmental disaster but headier.’. They are awkward to store and bloody heavy. The only other alternative is nipping to the local garage with a series of jerry cans and then driving very carefully back round the A12 roundabout trying not to crash into Deliveroo drivers and turn into a blazing fireball. On balance, the boxes are the better option.

Because I had to be up early for the delivery, I didn’t get to sleep until 3.00 a.m. I woke up roughly every hour thereafter until my alarm went off. Then, just as I had poured a strong coffee into my face in an attempt to perk myself up, we got a message to say that the delivery had been delayed and wouldn’t be arriving until 10.30 a.m. I was fairly tetchy about that, because there was at that point, zero chance of me getting back to sleep and I was beginning to develop a chunky headache.

I decided to tackle a few of the things I have been putting off because I knew that doing them would irritate me. I was already awake and annoyed so it wasn’t like I was spoiling a Hallmark moment. I booked a doctor’s appointment to look at an interesting mole. I booked an extremely overdue hypertension review. I ordered my medication. I baulked at dealing with the insistent messages about my smear test because after last year’s horrors, nothing on earth will get me to open my legs for anyone who isn’t a) my husband or b) Idris Elba.

Jason went through all our life admin paperwork at the weekend and decided it was about time that we got to grips with remaking our wills and sorting out medical and financial powers of attorney. He’s right. Of course he’s right. I spent all summer prodding my parents with a stick to get them to make theirs, but I still hate it and I have been quietly being a sullen teenager about the whole affair.

This will be the third will I have made, apart from that morbid period in my early teens where I made a new will every day and hid them round the house for my family to find. It was a dark time, so dark that my family failed to see the huge red flags around the state of my mental health because it was the Eighties and nobody in Britain had mental health then. Except my uncle’s mum, who had to be sent to the local mental hospital every time her tea towel hoarding got out of control. I wasn’t hoarding tea towels, so there was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

The first time I made a proper, grown up will, the guy guiding us through it took against me because I refused to say whether I wanted to be buried or cremated. He explained in withering tones how that was ‘a lot of admin for the bereaved,’ implying sheer indolence on my part, as if I were lying on a chaise longue, hoofing grapes into my face and leaving it all for the staff to tidy up. There are only two choices (if you discount the more esoteric options) and really, who cares?

I mean, in the old days they definitely did. I once went to a churchyard in Strata Florida in Wales, just to see the grave of the left leg of Henry Hughes Cooper. He had been on a long sea voyage when he sustained some kind of horrific injury that required his leg to be amputated. Worried that he wouldn’t be allowed into heaven when he died if his body wasn’t fully intact, he had his leg pickled in a barrel of brandy and sent home to Wales, ready for his return. Unfortunately he ended up dying in the States and his body and his leg were never reunited. I trust that God was merciful and let both him and his leg in at different times.

I am still undecided on what will happen to my remains but the children have all been primed with regards to the funeral. There are so many aspects - big hats, roller skates, nudity and Gloria Gaynor are but a few- that they may want to do it in a series of events or over a long weekend, in the manner of Glastonbury. I’m only sorry I won’t be there to see it.

The second time I made a will, I had small children to consider. This was very much a panic will in which we thought about all the people we could entrust with the children if we, like the unlucky parents of James Henry Trotter, got devoured by an escaped rhinoceros. Nobody wants to think they have accidentally left their children in the care of Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge, even if they will eventually be flattened by an enormous stone fruit. It was intense, and now it is largely irrelevant given that the one child left at home has facial hair, an impending job at Greggs and a future at the New York School of Performing Arts where fame is going to cost him, in sweat.

Now we have to think about making sure that we don’t have to sell the boat to pay for care homes where nobody will shave my legs for me and I will be forced to drink weak tea at all hours, accompanied by enthusiastic Rory on his acoustic guitar massacring Ed Sheeran songs to cheer me up. I hate Ed Sheeran songs at the best of times and must, annoyingly, make stringent plans for a Sheeran-less future and an allowance for waxing my moustache. If making a will guarantees me smooth legs, an espresso and a more Lady Gaga old age, I’ll do it. So I bit the bullet and made an appointment for next week.

I used to work in a solicitors back in the day. They specialised in wills and conveyancing with the odd foray into litigation, so we never had the heady thrills of crime to deal with, but it’s amazing how much drama there still is around wills. One woman upset her entire family by leaving all her money to Kew Seed Bank, which seems pretty righteous to me. One lady repeatedly wrote in about a set of silver teaspoons she had been wrongly denied in a will. For the amount of money we ended up billing her, she could have commissioned Theo Fennel to make hand make her a set to replace them. I would quite like to leave some weird bequests in mine but I am sure that my kids are pretty unshockable by now. The most I can expect is a rolled eye and a ‘very much on brand for mum.’

By the time I’d done all the life/death admin, the diesel lorry had arrived. Oscar and I manfully did the needful and have managed to Tetris all the boxes into the top of the boat without dropping any or falling in the marina. We sent Jason photographic proof of our haulage excellence and now I need to go and find a clean vest before I take my interesting mole for an outing to visit the doctor.