Robert Crampton
The money is heading 200 yards away
Diana Rigg, who died in September last year, left most of her £3.3 million estate to her daughter. But she also left £5,000 to Jessica Zhu, her beautician of 20 years. The actress had spent so many happy hours in Zhu’s care and company at the Nail Gallery in Fulham, west London, that she wanted to express her gratitude. As it is, Zhu has very classily refused the bequest, handing the money to the actress’s grandson. Which doesn’t detract from Dame Diana’s generosity, nor stop me wondering who I might similarly favour when my time comes.
Any spare £5,000 I’ve got when I get around to making a will is heading straight to Mustafa. Mustafa has run the corner shop 200 yards from my house, 7am to 11pm, for the past 20-plus years. I spend a great deal of my money there in life; he might as well have a chunk more of it in death.
Mustafa, not forgetting his brother Akif, has offered me friendship, advice, opinions, banking facilities, lavish hospitality at family gatherings in outer London and, on several occasions, content for columns. He’s let me use his basement loo at closing time when I’ve been too desperate to make the two-minute walk home having baled drunkenly out of a cab. He’s treated me to many samples of the Turkish delicacies Uncle Mehmet cooks up in the storeroom.
He’s kept me abreast of political developments back in Istanbul. Best of all, he lets my family, and a choice few friends, run a tab. It once got to four figures — no one could accuse Mustafa’s of being keenly priced. But he is honest as the day is long and, in his case, it’s a very long day indeed. The man’s immigrant work ethic is a lesson to us all.
We can chat at length, or we can conduct our business supremely efficiently. In my drinking days I’d simply reverse up to the counter with my backpack on, Mustafa would insert the required bottle and I’d leave. No words, let alone cash, exchanged. A well-oiled operation, you might call it. When I told him I was quitting the booze he lifted an eyebrow and just said, “That is good, Robert,” even though he knew it would hit his profits hard. I’m in his debt. He will fully deserve his five grand windfall. I’ll tell you what as well: he’ll keep it.
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Caitlin Moran
My five grand goes to the man who told me I was smart and changed my life
It was maybe 20 years ago, now — before I’d had kids, or written any books, or had therapy, or done anything, really, other than go out with an abusive man, smoke a lot of marijuana and then have a nervous breakdown. I was so riddled with insecurities that I barely left the house, and had to eat a minimum of one pot (500g) of Häagen-Dazs in order to write anything. If it was a 2,000-word feature, that would require four pots of Häagen-Dazs. It was a simple case of mathematics.
Anyway, in the midst of these broken, low-ego years, a newspaper executive called Keith called me into the office to discuss a promotion, which I immediately freaked out about. I absolutely knew I wasn’t up to the job. Couldn’t handle it. This would be the thing that, eventually, got me fired, which I’d always known would happen one day, anyway.
When I freaked out, murmuring, “I just don’t think I’ll be able to do it”, he said: “Caitlin, you can absolutely do this because you’re really, really f***ing clever. In fact, you might be one of cleverest people I’ve ever met.”
No one had ever said that to me before. Ever. I know, because hearing him say it put me into mild shock and made me cry — Keith had to hand me a lot of tissues that day — and on the Tube on the way home I had to really think about what he’d said, like I was sitting on a new, hatching thought-egg.
I mean, he might have been making it up, and I suspect it’s eminently provable that I’m not that clever — not least because someone truly intelligent wouldn’t write about it 20 years later, leaving the goal wide open for people to shout: “KEITH WAS WRONG AND YOU ARE AN IDIOT.”
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But, back then, I started to gloat over that sentence like a dragon — albeit it one eating a lot of ice cream — sitting on a hoard of gold. I treasured that sentence. It was the most precious thing anyone had ever said to me. And I wanted so much for it to be true that I started trying to write like I was clever: really tried to be thoughtful and figure things out. Someone, somewhere, thought I might be smart. Someone, somewhere, had given me what was genuinely the best present I’ve ever received. I can still feel the new synapses that grew in my head after hearing that sentence — a part of my brain that now believes I can work up an idea, or think a new thing.
If I could, I’d give him ONE MILLION BILLION DOLLARS — as that is easily what that sentence has been worth to me — but apparently the conceit of this piece is you can only give £5,000, so here it is, with all my intelligent love. Use some of it to buy more tissues, for the next woman whose life you change by saying: “You’re smart.”
Janice Turner
The carers who look after my mum deserve this
I couldn’t leave the £5,000 to one person, but to the whole team of carers who tend my mother at her nursing home. (The rules are strict: gifts to individuals are forbidden, instead presents are put into a raffle for the whole staff.)
Some of these women, who I’ve come to know these past, sad three years, have a special place in my heart. For putting my mum on the phone to me during a rare, lucid moment. For making me laugh when I visit, because they know how upsetting it can be. For always treating my mum like an individual with likes and dislikes, when the indignities of extreme age (she was 98 last week) make her ever more a silent body in a bed.
But they all deserve a reward: every one. The pandemic has left them exhausted. They heroically kept out the virus in the first wave, only to lose half their residents when Delta swept in. Several have long Covid, some are leaving, all are overworked.
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I’d hope the legacy would give them a nice party or an outing or some gizmo they might all enjoy (a posh coffee machine?). But really £5,000 is nothing. It should shame us that those who wash, dress, feed and soothe our loved ones in their final months earn about the same as shelf-stackers. Care work is called a “vocation”, that term always used to justify underpaying women. But they don’t need a halo, or a one-off bequest — just fair wages.
Giles Coren
And to my two cats I leave . . .
Personally, I plan to spend the vast Coren millions accrued over a long and very hard-working life — slogging my guts out for sometimes as much as three hours a day, four days a week — myself. At the very moment that the last breath spills weakly from my pale lips, I expect the lights to go out as the electricity meter chinks over to “zero”. I hope that as they carry my wizened, 110-year-old corpse out of the front door in the cardboard box that is all my estate can afford, there are other hefty lads doing the same with the TVs, cookers, beds, fine furniture and cars whose leases expired on the very afternoon that mine did. They say you can’t take it with you, and you sure as hell don’t want to give it away while you’re alive, so the best thing is to spend it all, to the last penny.
But if, by some terrible miscalculation, there is £5,000 left when I reach my end, it will go to my cats, Iris and Mo Tenzing. Two and a half grand each.
My children certainly aren’t getting it. Can’t have their ambition stunted by a huge windfall like that at the tender ages of 69 and 67. And Esther isn’t having it, to go flouncing off to the Bahamas with the fancy man she will have been able to lure quite easily with her looks alone, being still only 99.
No point leaving it to some charity, as I won’t be around to enjoy the applause for my selflessness, and no other human will get their hands on it, because if I’m not there to receive their gratitude in person, what’s the point? And besides, I wouldn’t want their crippling grief at my passing to be mitigated by anything as tawdry as a cash prize.
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Cats, on the other hand, are not grateful for anything you do for them at the best of times, so there’s nothing to be gained by being alive when you give them a present. And there is no question of their grief being offset by the joy of inheritance because, as every cat lover knows, they couldn’t give a damn whether I live or die anyway.
James Marriott
I’d bequeath the money to my dusty old haunt
When somebody decided that a cheap junior membership might be a good way for Newcastle’s beautiful private library, the Lit & Phil, to engage the next generation of readers I suppose the idea was that the scheme would help to ensure the library’s long-term financial future.
Unfortunately, I have the guilty sense that as an enthusiastic but highly forgetful and irresponsible adolescent borrower not all the books I borrowed were necessarily returned.
I’m not sure what the interest is on their library fines but I suspect five grand might not necessarily cover whatever it is I owe them by the time I die. They need the money anyway: bits always seemed to be falling off its grand Georgian interior so perhaps they could buy some glue to stick a few of those back on. The place also needed dusting so perhaps they could buy a Hoover.
They also had an absurdly cheap scheme whereby you could get a cup of coffee and a biscuit for about 50p, which almost certainly can’t have been sustainable but is surely the kind of scheme that needs encouraging.
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Failing that perhaps they could distribute a series of small cash bursaries to the library’s various eccentrics: the man who kept trying to persuade me to become a Jehovah’s Witness; the woman who worked on the issue desk who always incorporated a small toy cat into her hairdo; the crowd of undermotivated enthusiasts of local history who spent most of their days ignoring their research and drinking tea instead. Spiritually speaking these are my people.
With five grand I can assuage some residual guilt and pay a small tribute to a place that made me the man I am today, ie bookish and socially incompetent. Thanks, Lit & Phil.
