LEGACY

I don’t know really whether I ought to mention this. After all, it hardly shows me off in the best of lights, which should, after all in an ideal world (at least I imagine so), be the entire purpose of continually writing about myself each and every day.

If it’s all about me, I might as well make myself look good.

Well, I imagine that quite a lot of people might think that it ought to be like that anyway. Although, looking back, it seems that I do still rather suffer from my old habit of “putting myself down before anyone else gets the chance to…” One day I wonder whether I might take that idea to its natural conclusion, but not yet. After all, we’re all having far too much fun for me to pull the plug just yet…

Somehow it seems as if I’ve really not ever quite got the hang of the whole notion of “making myself look good”, not least because it would be far too much like hard work, and, instead, together we’ve delved deeply into the darkness at the heart of me and regularly come up for air afterwards reassured in the knowledge that I’m just as bloody neurotic as I always was.

So anyway, having taken that little detour around the backwoods of my psyche, what exactly is it that I think I ought not to be mentioning…?

Well… The thing is…

My mother received a letter the other day informing her that her late, lamented friend and partner had left her a small legacy in his Will. Nothing much, you understand, but enough for her to feel that she really had been special enough to him to merit some recognition. In itself, I suspect that this ought to be enough and is the real purpose of such matters, but nevertheless, I found myself hearing the familiar alarm bells as I heard the news unfolding down my telephone.

She had left me a message on my answering service to tell me this news, and, because I hadn’t immediately leapt at the phone in excitement, she then rang me up again later and, rather naturally, as is the nature of our conversations, seemed rather disappointed at my general lack of enthusiasm.

The main problem was that all I could see at that particular moment was how it will doubtlessly go. Nothing will actually happen, the executors will never send her any money, and she’ll get more and more irritated by it and eventually will decide to interfere and then all hell will break loose, because tact and diplomacy are not the strongest strand of our family’s fading genetic code.

I do tend to have a bad habit of looking at the bigger picture and I know how “people” are and I know how my mum gets, and how affronted she can become when things don’t quite work out the way that she believes that they ought to…

Maybe it IS that I just can’t seem to get any joy out of other people’s good fortune, but I’m not really the man to go to if you wish to talk about such matters.

Now, it’s a small thing and adds up to nothing very much in the great scheme of things, and it’s a rather lovely thing for her to have been remembered and mentioned at all, but I can’t help but think that an act done with the very best of intentions, and a letter ostensibly bringing “good” news, could turn into something far less enjoyable than was hoped.

And so it came to pass. The letter did suggest sending a solicitor’s letter for clarification, and, my mother being a creature of impulse, that’s precisely what she did, only to receive a phone call in reply which wondered why she had sent the letter instead of calling, suggesting that such a letter implied that she thought something “dodgy” had been afoot, and also informing her that there was no money anyway because there had been a lot of “expenses” after the funeral.

When I was younger I used to dream of being left an unexpected legacy, perhaps by my “real” family who had decided to leave me, for reasons known only to them, with the weird bunch I grew up with, but it never came to pass. Now, of course, I realise that to be left such a thing is, quite frankly, a bit of a pain in the backside and, as ever, whilst we can all stand a little despair in our lives, it’s that niggling little matter of being given just the tiniest glimmer of hope that’ll bring us down.

You can beam me back up to the spaceship now, spawn-weavers!