Yesterday morning after I had done some exercises and had a shower, I received a bit of a shock. Our domestic help calls around the day before and she has been excellent, gradually and carefully disposing of some of Meg’s clothing in a sensitive way, taking the best items to a charity shop for example. But yesterday when I entered the small room that we have adjacent to our bedroom and which acts as a store for clothing, then the rail upon which Meg’s best dresses had been hanging (e.g. those bought for 25th, 40th and 50th wedding anniversaries) was completely empty. Our domestic help had evidently, and rightly, thought it was time for these to go but it did precipitate rather a weepy moment when I saw the starkness of the empty rail. Our domestic help was quite correct in what she had done but it was just one of those moments that brings home to you the finality of the passing of a spouse. But I got over this as ‘life is for the living’ and the rest of the day proceeded smoothly particularly as my son had called around and we made final arrangements for the transfer of the car. Talking of this, about two cars ago, as it were, I invested in a couple of what are called ‘Car boot organisers’ and they have proved to be absolutely excellent. They are containers of sturdy plastic and fabric material divided into two equal compartments and, as such, are excellent containers in which to place filled shopping bags to make sure they do not roll all over the boot. Even if one does fall over and its contents spill, then this will be contained and not be spread by the motion of the car all over the boot. As I have found these so useful I have transferred them from one car to another but I have taken them and given them a through deep clean so that they start off life in the new car in good condition. I am delighted, by the way, that my son is passing onto to me a specialist boot-liner for the car, tailored exactly by the manufacturer to the dimensions of the boot.
One of my evening routines is to look at my accounts and evidently pay any bills as I did yesterday for both the hairdresser and the chiropodist. I was both intrigued and delighted to find a small amount of money had been paid into what used to be the joint account owned by Meg and myself and this was sent by the DWP with Meg’s National Insurance number and a strange code of ‘PSCS’ I went on the internet to discover what this all might mean and a found a forum in which somebody else had the same thing happened to them six weeks after their husband’s death (and as it happens this is just the period of time since Meg died) I am now pretty sure I know what this is because it will represent one week of state retirement pension which would have covered the period from the date of the last payment until the day of Meg’s death. This little payment had come at just the right time because I am counting off the remaining days until I receive my normal payment as well as my bank balance has been rather bashed with paying for the car insurance, road fund tax and breakdown cover for the car before I can actually legally drive it. On the issues of finance, I have one or two legacy accounts provided by a building society with about £1 in each one and I had completely forgotten my log on credentials. However, I have a little old diary squirrelled away with some legacy passwords in it and tried the one associated with an account called ‘Egg’ that I used to have decades ago. Yorkshire Building Society took over Egg ‘lock, stock and barrel’ (account and domain names) in 2011 so fourteen years ago. But my credentials still worked and I am going to use one of these legacy accounts in which to save any monies that I am going to put by on a monthly basis to find car expenses as they become due (in now a year’s time) So this was quite a pleasant little bonus with which to round after the evening.
In the morning, I had arranged to meet my son down at Waitrose so I walked down the hill and picked up my daily newspaper. If I am not prompt on a Saturday morning, the weekend editions of The Times seem to sell out pretty quickly as I have learnt to my cost. Then my son said he would treat me to a full cooked breakfast at Webbs which we both enjoyed and after that, used the wide open spaces of the car parking spaces provided for me to get used to the handling characteristics of the car I am due to inherit tomorrow morning. The most difficult thing to which I had to get used was the electronic parking as in my previous Honda you could almost ‘set it and forget it’ but the Mazda has a slightly different sequence so I had to ‘unlearn’ what I remembered from the previous car and get used to the settings. After a few practice stops and starts, we set off for the local garage from where my son will pick up his new car in the morning. He needed to go on and pay for it this morning (rather than at the weekend) and check that all of the optional extras had been included after which we came home. Once we had a cup of tea, we turned our joint attention to the legacy building society account(s) I had learnt how to access yesterday. Between us, we installed an app on my iPhone and then used this to rename one account to the name I had chosen for it and then deleted the few other accounts each with minimal amounts of money in them into my remaining account. So now I am all set up with a savings account so that all my car expenditure funds can be kept in one place and I can transfer some spare funds into it as soon as I have some spare cash.