My built in oven broke, or at least was on its way out. I could turn the knob (yes, it’s that old) to the required setting but there was absolutely no certainty it would switch on.

We did the maths and worked out that it was maybe 15-20 years old. Ho hum. Time for a replacement.

Being middle-class wealthy, we headed to John Lewis after a quick look through the Which Consumer Guide to domestic appliances and chose their BEST BUY, plus the option for them to take away the old oven and fit the new one.

Everything was going really well. They arrived. The old oven was removed and the new one installed. A quick safety check and they could leave.

Oh dear.

Apparently the impedance in my electricity supply to the oven socket was too high at 1.35 (ohms?) So the men uninstalled the oven and left with instructions that I needed to contact a qualified electrician to sort things out. The implication was that my electricity supply was unsafe.

Cheery news – not.

My electrician arrived, checked the oven, saw no problem but agreed that the impedance to the rest of the kitchen was too high and moreover that my very old fuse box could probably do with replacing. he wasn’t ready to say that I needed an entirely new earth system, but possibly?

He is honest as the day is long so having fitted the oven, I’ve scheduled some time for him to replace the fuse box next week. Once that job is done, we can check the impedance again and see if it’s still too high and a new earth is required (different company UK Power Networks) to make my house safe.

A new fuse box will at least have an RCD (Residual Current Device) that will trip quickly if there’s a fault though to be honest, after living with the current one for nearly thirty years and no harm, I’m pretty blasé about the situation.

What was driving me crazy was having a new oven sitting in my kitchen unusable, even though given the heat we’re seeing at the moment I had no desire to bake.

Now that it’s finally connected I have different issues. It’s wifi enabled, talks to my phone and seems to get daily software updates.

Why?

There is an author that I exchange emails with, provide some feedback to her novels etc. She has an editor so I’m generally just commenting on the narrative flow, raising the obvious questions and being a huge fan. She writes dystopian fiction, or at least that series I’m most connected to is a piece of American dystopian fiction.

I can’t imagine how tricky it is to write dystopian fiction in a country where that dystopia is playing out in real-time in government. Obviously it’s missing the werewolves and other woohoo but everything else is pretty much there. Wait a few days and the net appalling thing will happen.

I am of an age to have grown up believing basically that the Americans were the heroes, that whatever might happen, the Americans were there to stand up for the downtrodden democracies around the world against aggressors.

I never expected to see video of Americans being pulled from their beds, from the streets by armed thugs wearing balaclavas.

Who imagined the American president siding with the Russian dictator Putin over poor Ukraine?

How did we reach a stage where Americans thought it right or reasonable to keep a body alive until it started rotting before cutting out a half-developed baby?

Where is the popular uprising, complete with excessive guns that were promised in the event of central government overreach?

The US president has crashed world markets, upended alliances, cancelled aid leading to the death of thousands, maybe millions worldwide. And all the time, the powers that should check him stay silent.

It’s not so much the single elderly man that leaves me worrying but rather the people around him riding his victory, encouraging his excesses.

The world is paying for the choice that America made between the competent black woman and this sh*t show.

Tax law changed in the UK, specifically Value Added Tax, a form of sales tax, now applies to private school fees. Given that typical fees for a day school are around £15k, the fact that they were exempt from VAT saved people a reasonable amount of money each year. So much so, that a small minority of parents will now have to relocate their children from private to state school.

I might have got into a fight with one of them on social media.

Before that change was implemented there were lots of claims that we’d see an influx of children into the state system that would not be able to cope, that in fact very little money would be made by the government making this change as a result.

It turns out that there re around 650k pupils in private schools in the UK, of which maybe 35k are estimated to be transferring to the state sector, a small proportion of the total. The change in tax will net the government a tidy sum that can be spent on free school meals for poorer kids, for more teachers and improved infrastructure in the state system.

For me, it seems like a good policy with good outcomes.

Of course my children are long past their school years and we could afford to send them to private schools even if VAT had been applied. Like most parents paying for the privilege, we were not at all price sensitive. During a time of low to no inflation, school fees doubled over six years. No one left their private schools.

The woman arguing with me on my socials doesn’t know my own kids’ educational background of course. She assumed that my children, if I had any, were state educated. She assumed my position was one of grievance, that I begrudged her something we could not afford ourselves.

Am I a hypocrite? Possibly. It doesn’t feel like the right word though.

I have never fooled myself that I wasn’t buying my girls something of value with their education, an advantage, and that as a consequence of that choice, other people’s children would be disadvantaged. It felt and still feels to me, that girls have plenty of disadvantages in life and spending money to advantage them went a small way to balancing that disadvantage. I accepted that it was unfair. Of course it was.

I have voted all of my life for a political party and system where in and ideal world both private and religious education would cease to exist. I would be happy in that world. But since we’re not there, and we could afford it, we chose private single-sex schools. I don’t regret the choice.

Having said all of that, the benefits of private education are not as great as you’d think. My girls had both good and bad teachers. they were in selective schools so the width band of educational needs was narrowed and easier to teach. This also meant that they had no idea that they were cleaver until they reached university which obviously impacted how they saw themselves, maybe still how they see themselves. The self-esteem of girls in selective same-sex schools can be difficult.

The facilities at the schools were good, but the really glamorous private school facilities tend to be sports based for boys schools, not academic girls’ schools. The breadth of subjects was broader initially, a choice of languages to learn, music and art as real subjects with dedicated time and teachers, but the academic pressures to perform pushed the children down fairly traditional academic routes.

I am genuinely sorry that this woman feels forced to move her child from her private school at 16. It must feel very disruptive. Her family must be quite angry and quite sad.

But that’s her problem. I don’t think that people struggling to get by in life should be asked to pay more tax to afford her a tax break on private schooling for her children whilst their own go to the local state school. I could afford the luxury of private education. Alas, she no longer can. Capitalism sucks.

She didn’t feel sorry for the neighbours who could never afford to send their children to private schools or at least not enough to send her child to the local state school in solidarity, to work within the system to improve the local state school. She is cross to have to give up the privilege that her child is enjoying, though to be honest the benefit is probably mostly in those years through to GCSE at 16. Many people choose to move their children at 16 within both state and private education.

She feels cross and maybe a bit reduced to her neighbours’ level.

She is not wealthy enough. Not now.

Ho hum.

Am I the hypocrite, or is she?

The NYTimes is running a series of articles to encourage creativity and one of them asks the reader to use a set list of words to create a poem.

In the comments to the article, there is a series of poems, long and short. People have engaged with the challenge but also want to share their creation.

Creation within constraints seems so much more achievable to people, and ever more meaningful if it can be shared.

We chase old age.

It might not feel so, to the young, but we chase old age. It is a target that moves further away the closer you get. Old? Not me. Even though as a child, being thirty was enough to qualify as old, suddenly nearing sixty seems inadequate to the definition.

There are some milestones along the way. Parents dying is strangely more ageing than birthing children. The latter makes you tired. The former makes you mortal. Perhaps the problem with all of the healthy living advice is simply that no twenty year old can ever believe that they will die. Not might die. Will die. Life is a zero sum game, after all.

And so on to sixty years of age.

The body aches but still manages to run and jump albeit with a longer recovery time. The mind is still sharp even though it holds so much more than my twenty year old self, most of it not about myself. Sometimes I wonder at the freedom of my younger self, to worry only about my needs, my own interests. None of these other people to concern myself with, neither the ageing partner nor the bright young adults; one negotiating the challenges of infirmity the other still making places for themselves in this world.

Now constrained not by money but by too many ties to other people and their care to actually let rip, to leave and head off on adventures.

We chase old age. It is ever out of reach. Until suddenly it isn’t.

It is harder to lend money to people than you’d think, at least if you want to get it back.

The bank of mum and dad provides around a fifth of finance for house purchases in the UK, mostly unofficial or at least unrecorded and therefore unregulated. Part of that it because the regulation that exists makes the process of lending awkward.

To lend money in the UK, basically requires a person to register with the Financial Conduct Authority, a body set up to regulate the thousands of financial services firms and the financial market.

By registering as a credit broker most of the problems associated with lending to family members go away but the process takes 6-12 months, so by the time most people find out, it’s too late and anyway, it’s a lot of faff filling in forms etc.

So then they may look at what exemptions there are within the regulations, and yes, there is an exemption for non-business loans made to family members. Since most people making loans to help get their kids on the property ladder are non-business ie there’s no interest or other benefit to the parent, the lender, then that isn’t a problem for most people. It would be fine for our situation except the idea of family is defined in law, and would not include the fiancee/boyfriend.

He was a bit cross about that, a bit indignant that any loan we made to him would likely be unenforceable in law, and that’s really not somewhere we want to find ourselves. They’ve been dating two years. He’s a lovely boy. Still, let’s not be daft. The laws exist to prevent someone (anyone really) setting up as a loan shark and fleecing desperate people of their hard earned cash. It’s not reasonable or at least not as unreasonable as expecting your girlfriend’s parents to effectively gift you a couple of hundred thousand and feel good about it. When your own parents will not.

So we could lend the money but only to our daughter, making her the 80% purchaser and therefore 80% owner of the house they planned to share as tenants in common. Cue much soul searching and entirely valid (though fundamentally frustrating) feelings around whether or not he could proceed as the ‘minority interest’ stake holder. Until his uncle told him to get a grip, get his head out of his arse and grab the most favourable arrangement in the history of spoiled North London boyfriends ever. Quick.

So we’re all agreed. What next. Apparently we’ve taken far more care with this than most people already in having the discussion because the biggest problem with family loans and the bank of mum and dad, by far, is simply that they’re not documented. At all. Which leaves some huge problems down the line for people when mum and dad want their money back and their child doesn’t want to give it back. Or can’t. Or (God forbid) has died and someone else just doesn’t recognise that a loan ever exists and mum and dad can’t prove it was a loan rather than an outright gift.

And the friend of a friend who is walking me though all of this then points out that the loan agreement is actually a very straightforward thing to draft unless there’s anything weird going on. And that it probably isn’t necessary to secure it against the house, providing your kids are on good terms but perhaps more importantly providing the loan amount is a relatively small part of their parents estate. No one is going to refuse to repay a loan when it costs them a huge amount of their inheritance.

So we have agreed on a five year loan with no interest chargeable for the shortfall in the house cost, to be made to my daughter only, unsecured on the house, but drafted, signed, enforceable in law, with a minimum repayment a month but no maximum and no fines or penalty charges if it’s repaid early ie if she takes out a ‘proper’ mortgage to buy out the loan. The agreement is drafted and will be signed by parents and child, witnessed and a copy kept in the safe. If it all goes tits up then the agreement will be enforced.

It’s a bloody marvellous deal for her.

If she defaults we can go to the courts and ask for repayment of the capital amount. Her only asset large enough to make good the loan is her 80% share of the house so she’d then have to sell. Hmm. What about the boyfriend?

Well, he’s not part of the loan arrangement at all, other than needing to be okay with selling the house if she defaults.

The friend of a friend did point out that the tricky bit in law would be agreeing a declaration of trust (or cohabitation agreement) between my daughter and her partner, laying out the terms on which they planned to live together in the house they’ve bought. Will they take into account capital sums invested in renovating the house? What about shared running costs? What happens to dividing up the sale proceeds when the house is sold, the costs and the profits? Under what circumstances can they sell the house?

So having sorted out our best option for financing our daughter, we’re (or at least they are) now getting advice on a legal agreement for them living together, something that can probably be a precursor to any prenuptial agreement they may need.

If it sounds less than romantic it’s because it’s a lot less than romantic! But most arguments in marriage are because of money. Marriage is not especially romantic at its heart – it’s still basically a legal agreement based around property transfer and the laws that govern property.

Money can and often is used to control people, to limit and constrain them. It is often a proxy for love and attention in peoples thoughts. And it makes people nervous to talk about money so they tend to make assumptions and to push it to the back of their minds and relationships. It’s only when money gets tight, or runs out entirely that those assumptions come back to bite. Everyone needs to shine a huge light on that stuff before it gets to that point, not afterwards!

I am always going to be salty about the fact that his parents are unwilling to financially support their son as well as we propose to support our daughter but the biggest red flag in these conversations has been the difficulty that the boyfriend and his family seem to have about talking openly about money and finance. Ho hum. She loves him. He’s a very nice boy. he says we shouldn’t worry, that he’ll never leave her, never be unkind.

& I really don’t know how to break it to him that he’s not the one we’re worried about. If she leaves him, he will get tricky, whatever his current plans or beliefs.