I am getting old. There have been a few occurrences recently that made it clear – I rejoined a gym for the millionth time, thinking that I would be in there every morning like I was in my 30s, pounding the treadmill like a Terminator or grunting under a bar. I went once and spent 20 minutes wandering aimlessly and then came home and ate five cold sausages. On another occasion, after an especially intense Lego build, I spent five minutes trying to get up off the floor, as between numb flesh and frozen joints, I felt like I was emerging from cryosleep. So I can’t just coast by anymore; fitness and health and now things I have to work at, rather than just enjoy as one the many benefits of relative youth. No, clearly something has to be done, and that something is making a will.

My wife gets terribly upset when I mention the inevitability of our demise. Please Bill, she says, I’m trying to watch Suits, please stop whispering about death at me; it’s Netflix and chill, not Netflix and chilling. But whether she wants to live in denial, avoiding the unavoidable truth by wasting hours of her life on a warmed-over Ally McBeal, or whether I want to indulge my inner goth, whispering of sweet nothingness at her, the end is coming, and we had best be prepared. 

Musing about what we would do if we won the lotto is really a lot less realistic than musing about what would happen if we were both to die in a car crash. And therein lies the main focus of our will – who will care for the kids? The longlist was easy: We’ve done a fairly terrible job with our offspring so far,  and that low bar means anyone in our wider circle of friends and family are in with a shot, but it’s still a big hypothetical ask, that becomes very real once you start contemplating it. Who would they like to live with, who would be capable of looking after them, who might actually wish to care for them? Even the longest list you could compile grows pretty short when you start factoring in simple things like economics – who could afford to feed and clothe them, because we just about manage to do it. After going through all that, you are left with a pretty short shortlist. Then, in a final irony, a friend rightly pointed out that it might be a lot easier to find a potential home for my children if I hadn’t spent so many column inches telling the world that they were out of control and belonged in a Channel 5 documentary. Not so much Who Will Love My Children? as it would be Who Will Tolerate My Infamous Brood? 

Eventually we decided on my wife’s sister and her husband, who seemed touched to have been asked, little realising that in fact it was like someone telling them that some day we may bequeath them a cursed monkey paw that will bring ruintion to their lovely home. Still, they have agreed, so there’s no backing out now. That is another box ticked – someone to care for the kids when we Thelma & Louise the people carrier into a ravine whilst trying to find Ikea. 

It brought home all the things we know now that we didn’t when we started our family – mainly, the massive responsibility. We thought of parenthood in an abstract way, in much the same way we think now about death, failing to take into account the practicalities – who cares for who, who gets what, where do we all end up. At least we have one possible future catered for, no matter how grim it is to contemplate it. All we need to do now is figure out how pensions work.