Celia Walden where there’s a will there’s a way; The new new thing Viking workouts

On little-neck clams, blue M&Ms and the real meaning of ‘spousal relief’

Do you think I should be cremated?’ In terms of moodkillers, I realise this is right up there. But I can’t help myself. Intense natural beauty of the kind my husband and I are gazing at from the sundeck of Moonshadows beachside restaurant in Malibu always makes me morbid. As does writing a will. ‘Don’t you want to fnish your littleneck clams frst?’ my husband fings back, anxious to inject some levity into the conversation. ‘I’m serious,’ I whisper, staring down at the mollusc on my fork and wondering whether this was all its pathetic little life amounted to: a parsley and lemon garnish. ‘I know,’ Piers groans. ‘You’ve been deathly serious all month.’

I doubt either of us will ever forget the day Date Night turned into Death Night. One minute we’re discussing the return of Tom Selleck’s moustachterpiece in Blue Bloods, the next I’m tearfully detailing my last wishes for our daughter, penned that morning (‘It’s so important that she keeps up her French – and please no blue M&Ms: you know how I feel about blue food’), as my husband tries to reassure the other diners with a nod and a smile that he’s not The Kind of Man Who Makes Women Cry in Restaurants. If I were in blue lipstick and a hospital gown, rigged up to a heart-rate monitor and fading in a made-for-TV-movie, the scene could not be more poignant. Until, that is, Piers points out that ‘of course death is not the immediate natural consequence of writing a will.’

Given how few of my friends have got around to doing it, I’m thinking the lawyers and death websites need to make this clearer. ‘For some reason men are especially reluctant to write wills,’ one lawyer explained – right after she had clarifed what “spousal relief ” meant (I’d always assumed it was that feeling you get when the ball and chain is away on business and you can spread out across the bed). Now this could be the case because men are not, like women, confronted by their own mortality the moment they give birth. Or it could be that they would rather spend those hours and days doing just about anything else.

Anyway it’s far longer than that: it is weeks and months immersed in every gloomy permutation of your own demise. With the delivery of a waiter detailing the day’s specials, the lawyer will conjure up a series of increasingly ghoulish scenarios (‘… now imagine you and your husband are run over by a bus together tomorrow’), culminating in some fnal-episode-of- Dynastystyle total familial annihilation (‘You, your husband and both sides of your extended family are crossing the road, when out of nowhere…’) that has you breaking out into a cold sweat every time you spot a number 9.

Even when it’s done – sealed, signed and fled away in a marbled box (because you wouldn’t want the fnal earthly memory of you tainted by a three-quid Ryman Polyfle), the stench of death lingers for some time. ‘I wish I were able to discuss dying in the pragmatic manner of the very young or very old,’ I sighed as we drove home at the end of that fateful night. Wordlessly, he nodded. ‘Or indeed,’ he added, a few minutes later, ‘stop discussing it altogether? Just a thought.’

My husband tries to reassure the other diners with a nod and a smile that he’s not The Kind of Man

Who Makes Women Cry in Restaurants