Not What It Says on the Tin!
I have recently put in some new radiators. The pipes from the floor need to be painted and I got some Dulux to match the radiator.
Paint Colours
Note that the pipe colour doesn’t seem to be anything like the oval on the tin.
Beckham’s Beard
David Beckham had grown a beard for the latest England game. He was asked if it was a new fashion statement or campaign.
He game the honest answer that ‘He was just too lazy to shave!’
That’s why I’ve had a beard for over forty years. I don’t think my youngest son, who is 37, has ever seen me without one!
My beard once featured in a letter to the PM program on Radio 4.
Fair Treatment of Widows by the Banks
I didn’t have a particularly bad time when my wife died from the banks. But many others do!
I’ve just listened to the influential MP, John McFall, complaining that many widows have difficulty accessing money that will come to them. I didn’t, but the endless sending of death certificates to get information just makes the bereavement process worse.
It’s not just the banks but part of a much larger and very important area.
It is now over nearly two years since my wife died and I can now think rationally about what has happened since. And especially about some of the nauseous paperwork that has arisen! I should also say that I’ve not had it difficult, compared to some stories I have heard.
I was prompted to write to The Times about this and they published my letter on April the sixteenth, 2008, albeit with a few modifications.
Sir, I was widowed last year, and it is only now that I’m starting to get my life together. The response of the various government and local authority departments in handling all the paperwork involved has been very patchy.
Registrars: excellent, very sympathetic and efficient; Work and Pensions: bereavement allowance came through with a few hiccups, but not too difficult; Premium Bonds: system worked but could have been better; council tax: this was reduced automatically on signing a form by St Edmundsbury — totally painless; DVLA: its online systems worked well; winter fuel payment: found difficult to claim and missed it for last year.
The private sector wasn’t that much better, with some companies having people whose sole job appeared to be to deal with bereavement faring much better than those that didn’t. Some wanted death certificates, some accepted faxed copies and others took my word.
We need a lot more joined-up thinking in this important area, as, with nearly a million deaths in the UK every year, it would surely help the bereavement process for those left behind if every company, organisation, government department and authority were automatically notified. After all, if St Edmundsbury can do it here in supposedly sleepy Suffolk, then surely everyone else can.
They left out the piece where I praised The Carphone Warehouse, but severely criticised a large British company, who find it impossible to take my wife off their mailing list. The former showed how it should be done and the latter are a disgrace.
As I said in my letter, my local council met the Gold Standard and the Registrar effectively started the process of adjusting the Council Tax.
In tracing my wife’s credit cards, I ended up talking to a Fraud Manager at a well-known bank. We felt that it should be possible to have an automated system that would flag the cards of those that had died. Apparently, these cards are an area that is aggressively targeted by criminals.
He’d also had problems with some shares that had been held by his late mother. This is a common problem and was noted in some of the replies to my letter in The Times. Luckily, my wife didn’t hold any shares except for a few in a now-floated Building Society.
But I’ve since met several people, whose husbands or wives have died abroad and they’ve had problems with getting bodies home and others where the Death Certificate has been delayed because there was an inquest. If you haven’t got the Death Certificate, then the Banks won’t give you access to the bank accounts!
So I had it easy. But I know now, how I can make things even easier.
The Anonymous Widower 