Why mobile phone wills are a drunk-text from disaster
There’s a quip doing the rounds these days which goes like this. Sad news: the man who invented predictive text has passed away. His funfair is next monkey.
I mention it because there are plans afoot to legally recognise wills made using voicemail and text messages.
Permission to approach the bench, M’lud? I’m all for a radical overhaul of inheritance laws, but not if Zoella has drawn up the legislation.
Surely there must be a middle way between long overdue modernisation and kowtowing to 21st-century, touch-of-a-keystroke laziness?
The Law Commission thinks it’s too much to expect people to write down their wishes and have them signed by a testator and two witnesses. But what sort of irresponsible slacker thinks that sensible provision for their nearest and dearest is a piece of admin too far?
Me, actually. Along with two-thirds of the adult population. I can’t speak for the others, but writing a will is on my to-do list, along with collecting those heeled boots I had resoled in 2010, learning how the scanner works and taking a balloon trip over Srinagar.
And truthfully, now that I will be able to leave my mortgage and modest collection of Norwegian enamel jewellery to my children via voicemail or text, I ought to feel relieved. But instead I feel irrationally irked.
Sartorial standards are slipping in the Palace of Westminster, but we expect a certain out-of-touch formality and stiff probity from the judiciary.
Besides, it’s so easy to drunk-text a boyfriend, how much easier to drunk-text a new last will and testament? I can’t be the only parent who has dozed off and woken to find a child pressing my index finger on the home button to open my phone and go on an itunes shopping spree.
Imagine the problems arising from the vagaries of predictive texting.
“No, no Madam, you will have to vacate the marital home forthwith. Your husband stated quite clearly on his text that he was leaving you the hose and all its contents.” It would be funny if it weren’t so scary.