How Not to Sort Out Your Life

The Beloved has a plan. To sort everything out. Or not.

The thing about plans is that sometimes they are great, think of lunar landings, recipes by Nigella Lawson and inventing chocolate. And oft as not, they are ill-conceived, think Apollo 13, recipes by Dr Crippen, World War I.

On the scale of plans the Beloved’s is somewhere between The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Millennium Dome. Sort of not quite rounded and rather chaotic. This is what happened:

Beloved: I have a plan.
Me: Good, that’s nice dear.
Beloved: Sign this piece of paper
Me: Good, that’s nice dear
Beloved hands me pen. I inspect piece of paper, as my father always told me not to sign anything without reading it first. This can be tricky when it comes to crowds wanting autographs in a hurry but since that situation is yet to arise I decide to read the piece of paper.
It is not so much a piece of paper as a form. Entitled ‘How to remove yourself from your life, home and not-marriage.’

The essence of the form is fairly straightforward. The usual gubbins, boxes, words, nicely shaded areas that indicate you don’t have to do anything in nicely shaded areas and that a designer has been hard at work choosing just that shade of pukey green to put in the nicely shaded areas.

The gist of the form is ‘Please sign away any rights to the last quarter of a century of your life, including any Physicists, Lawyers, decorative but slightly decrepit houses and decorative but slightly decrepit Beloveds.’

I fiddle with the pen. I think. Hard. This is a hard decision on par with very hard decisions one has known. Worse than deciding on what colour to paint the sitting room, what to name the cat or even how many dining room chairs we might need should we ever invite someone to dinner. I think some more. I fiddle with the pen some more. I look across the table at the beloved. He morphs strangely into one of those evil baddies from a 1950s horror movie. I can hear a strange ‘Ha ha ha ha’ in ever descending tones.

‘I’ll get back to you on this one.’ I say handing him the pen.

I think I handled the whole situation quite well. I always was rather good at forms.