PAPERWORK (2)

I think that I may already have mentioned how much I despise doing paperwork, especially when it's paperwork that I simply don't understand like the increasing mountain of stuff that seems to have appeared since we started going through mum's papers over the last couple of weeks.

The general feeling that I don't know what to do and that somehow I ought to be doing something is really starting to trigger such severe overnight panic attacks that I'm no longer sleeping, and every time I try to make a start on it, the sheer volume of it just causes another meltdown and, in the end, nothing gets done.

That, coupled with the fact that every time I even do get hold of a daunting and very official looking form, it turns out that I can't even tick box number one until I get details from another piece of paperwork which I may or may not yet have, means that the panic spiral builds up so high, that I shove it back in the bag and go off into a corner to whimper again.

And there's the constant sense that other people are waiting for me to do something, whilst I am waiting for them to do something so that I can do my something, and I don't understand any more whose something we're all waiting for. I have forms that I can't fill in from the solicitors, but the solicitors are supposed to contact me about some details about instigation of probate, although it's far more likely that I was supposed to contact them and they're waiting for me to complete the forms which I can't complete without the details from them.

Meanwhile, more and more bills continue to roll in which I'm supposed to hand on to the people dealing with the probate which, in the end, might just turn out to be me after all, but I don't know where I can send them, or even if I can send them until I know what the procedure is supposed to be, despite the fact that it all sounded so simple when it was first explained to me and that I'd actually have to do very little myself.

Well, at least I'm getting that bit right.

But believe me when I tell you that I think I'm on the brink of having a total breakdown over this.

Somewhere in the middle of all this chaos, which is, incidentally, still genuine chaos given that the house is still in a complete shambles from the builders being here because we've not had any time since to sort any of that out under the circumstances, a vast wodge of paperwork arrived about my own pension and accidentally got mixed in with the many envelopes pouring in about my mother, and, when I did find it, seemed to be written in such bewildering financial gobbledegook that I couldn't make head nor tail of it and quietly slipped it back inside the envelope and chose to ignore it until another time, or until the people who are so desperate for me to complete that actually provide me with a simple summary that I can finally understand.

I don't remember being aware of anything like this amount of stuff on previous occasions when family members passed away. It all seemed to go so damned smoothly, and all that people seemed to do was right "Thank You" cards to the appropriate people. This means, of course, that any and all of the current and ensuing chaos must be all my own fault and I'm going to get blamed when everything goes wrong and the financial burdens which already seem to be approaching numbers far beyond my own tiny annual salary will come slamming down upon me and leave me responsible for a mountain of debt that I am unable to service and it all, quite frankly, terrifies me...

PAPERWORK (1)

I keep putting off doing any of the paperwork involved in the sorting out of mum's estate. Every time I think about sitting down and making a start on it, I seem to get overwhelmed by waves of both utter sadness and utter fear and, whilst I know that it all needs to be done, coupled with the fact that the gnawing pain of it not having been done is starting to make me feel sick to my stomach, means that somehow putting it off seems to be the only thing that I'm currently capable of.

When I got home one evening to find yet more mail addressed "c/o the Executors" and it turned out to be a bill for her care alarm button which I thought I'd paid last month and which seemed to have been invoiced through to a week after they'd collected the equipment and nearly a fortnight after her death, I will admit that my depression spiralled downwards pretty swiftly, especially as the office invoicing me had already closed for the day and that sick feeling in my stomach that I'd forgotten to do something important already, and before I'd even begun, was not going to go away overnight.

It's not as if paperwork is something I enjoy doing, although I'm sure that I'm not the only one who feels like that about it, and I might even go so far as to suggest that I'm fairly certain that is a pretty common feeling. I only have to open an envelope which requires me to do something about something, send something to someone, or complete as little as one page of questions, and my heart sinks like a stone as yet another wave of panic hits me full square in the pit of my churning stomach.

When it comes to the already huge-seeming mountain of envelopes regarding the Estate, everything I open and everything I touch seems to be demanding that eventually I will have to pay out huge sums of money that I don't have to people and bodies that I have never previously had any dealings with and demanding of me that I sign things and "take responsibility" for all manner of things which I imagine are going to financially bleed me dry even though I genuinely don't believe that they have anything to do with me.

My approach with such matters in my own life has always been to deal with it once and forget about it forever, which seldom seems to satisfy the strangely paperwork obsessives at things like insurance and pension companies, especially as they have danced their merry dance of corporate ownership over the past half decade or so, so it's pretty galling to have to go through it all in the aftermath of someone else's life, especially as that life is, sadly, no longer being lived.

But then, the prospect of dealing with mum's estate is pretty terrifying to me because there's so much that I could get wrong, so many pitfalls and traps into which I could hall, and so many things which I might possibly just forget to do, or, perhaps even worse, fail to know that I have to do, and every last one of them seems to want to financially penalise me for my own ignorance.

I do, after all, have to fill in reams of legalese so that probate can take place, and it seems to go on for pages, all of which seem to remind me of this fee or that fee, and that the hourly rate for various services charged seems to be about what I get for working an entire week, such were the benefits of a Law School education over an Art School one. Mind you, I'd never have been able to handle the paperwork if I'd made that other choice...

There is also a certain amount of urgency involved in attempting to put the flat onto the market, not least because my sister really does need to go home at some point, and the services to the place are beginning to be shut down as the contracts lose their regular monthly contributions.

Other files have revealed yet more paperwork which needs going through with a fine-tooth comb for things which may have been investments or insurance policies or pension plans, all of which may have been superceded by the merry dance that I mentioned, but all of which need checking into and, I expect, will demand more of the limited amount of official death certificates that will need requesting at a tenner a time...

Meanwhile, the month has turned and the next round of mum's Standing Orders and Direct Debits have become due and, no doubt, a whole raft of letters and demands will appear from various sources about which I'd forgotten, wondering where their payments are.

All of these things are distracting me from both getting refocussed upon my own work and preventing me from sleeping, as well as interfering with the natural process of just missing my mum which is, I fear, going to hit me like a sledgehammer any time now, even if it hasn't already done so and I hadn't yet realised it.

I have, however, with a lot of help from my Beloved, managed to drag myself up to the keyboard and make a start, so that, at the very least, two of the most urgent bills have been paid, even if it was out of my own bank balance which is already being stretched to breaking point. The Solicitor had said to me that the relatives shouldn't have to fork out a penny, and that all the creditors would have to wait for probate, but somehow it seemed wrong for mum to pay for the food at her own funeral, and a care bill that had slipped through the net back in April really needed to be paid, especially as I'd already promised mum that I'd "deal with it" during her last couple of weeks in hospital when it appeared, and was indeed going to sort it out on the very evening of the day I was summoned to the hospital to keep her company through her last afternoon.

BUILDERS (2)

I'm sorry if I keep on returning to this notion, but I regularly start to convince myself that this particular blog is doomed. Never more so than in recent times when it's just become increasingly difficult to get much in the way of "keyboard time" as the chaos of everyday life swirled around me.

Some days I just wonder whether I'm going to get any chance at all to it myself down and do anything more than splurge out a few thoughtless words, and on some mornings I wonder whether I'll even manage to to that.

Then there's the tricky little matter of having so much thinking going on inside my head that, perhaps with an irony that has yet to hit me, I can't think of anything to actually write about.

At least, nothing that I would imagine would have been of any actual interest to anybody else...

Take, for example, the other day.

I idly decided that, given the amount of "add-ons" that had accumulated with the building work that was being done on the rickety hovel that we refer to as "Blogfordshire Towers" it might be worth just asking what the current running total might actually be, before I committed us to yet another additional bit of work that had revealed itself to be, if not exactly imminently necessary, then certainly on the agenda.

The answer kind of floored me, and, having texted the beloved with the dreadful news, ranted to various people about it and (because this is the nature of modern life) Tweeted about it afterwards:

Today it turns out that I forgot the "Grand Designs" first rule of building budgeting: Assume everything will double, and then add the VAT.

I then found out that there had been some kind of misunderstanding which meant that the eight or nine hours of bowel-cramping anxiety and running around wondering what we were going to do without any savings left, and where the hell I was going to find the extra cash to pay for the work that was still in progress, that I had put myself through had all been pointless and that things were still pretty much in the ball-park of our initial expectations.

Which only goes to show that, when someone uses a phrase like "about twelve" it's probably wise to make sure that you're both talking about the same thing, and to know which units they are working in.

THE ELSIE TENNER

As I sometimes will, I ill-advisedly weighed into the debate on bank notes the other day by pointing out to someone who was complaining about the lack of female representation upon them that "the Queen is on all of them, of course" a smug comment for which I was quite rightly slapped down, but which I felt was a point worth making because in all of the articles that have been written about these matters over the past few days, that one point is seldom made.

For good reason, of course, because she's not actually there on merit but because of a tradition dating back through thousands of years and a fair few empires.

Anyway, the good-natured banter continued and the person I was e-chatting (actually the representative of the "Lass O'Gowrie" pub in Manchester) to mentioned that they were quite keen for the strong female characters from "Coronation Street" to appear on the notes, from Ena Sharples on the fiver right on through to Annie Walker on the fifty.

I "wittily" retorted "An Elsie Tenner...?" which was enthusiastically received with a hearty "someone should mock one of those up" and, with the aid of a handy ten-minute coffee break and a couple of Photoshop filters, ten minutes later, in my own lazy and slightly incompetent way, I had, because I couldn't imagine anyone else being bothered to...

Obviously, someone more committed to the "joke" might have spent an entire evening mocking up something far more elaborate and convincing but sometimes it's just about throwing stuff together to get the point across, and I hope that the two-hundred-plus people who went and had a look, and the debate that was started later on that evening about what people might spend it on gave them all a few seconds of fun as they travelled on through this bleak grey world of ours.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the chances of the powers that be putting either Emmeline pankhurst or Jane Austen on the fiver seems to be a pretty safe bet at the moment, considering that there seems to have been quite a backlash since it was announced that Elizabeth Fry was going to be replaced by Sir Winston Churchill.

Emmeline Pankhurst makes the most sense, I suppose, given that her efforts did far more to change the ordinary lives of so many women than a lot of people have, although Mary Seacole, Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Bronte also have their supporters.

But this is the problem isn't it?

As "Horrible Histories" have also found, it's actually quite difficult to trawl through the pages of history and find many strong female role models to get the girls to also feel connected to our history because for so much of our history women were either not allowed to be in positions of power or simply not recognised by the patriarchal culture in which they existed.

So it might seem rather strange then that so many of that short list are writers, as if that was one of the very few ways that you could make any impact as a woman in those pre-twentieth century days. Unless you were a goddess of course, or an empress, or a queen, or a freedom fighter, or a saint, or a mistress, or a whore... The occasional scientist gets remembered, of course, and the odd economist, nurse, or engineer, but all-in-all, it's not the longest of lists.

Interestingly enough that anonymous person from the "Lass O'Gowrie" might have stumbled upon the interesting point that it is in television drama, and most especially the soaps, that the strongest female role models have been considered to be more universally acceptable and have been allowed to shine and dominate their environments.

It's also quite fascinating to see how poorly Australia treated its first female Prime Minister and not just this week, but over the entire duration of her tenure.

The world, it seems, still has an awful long way to go.