My battle of the wills - with my own wife: Should DAVID AARONOVITCH outlive his beloved spouse, there'll be no blowing of his inheritance... she now wants to 'update' and redraw their final wishes...

My battle of the wills - with my own wife: Should DAVID AARONOVITCH outlive his beloved spouse, there'll be no blowing of his inheritance...

she now wants to 'update' and redraw their final wishes...

By David Aaronovitch For You Magazine Published: 11:43 BST, 22 June 2024 | Updated: 11:57 BST, 22 June 2024 e-mail View comments Our will – mine and my wife Sarah's – is so old that it doesn't even exist online, only as a fading document in a rarely opened drawer. And it is a thing of beautiful simplicity, which says that if I go first, she gets everything, if she goes first then it all comes to me, and if that balloon trip over Monument Valley goes horribly wrong, then it all gets divided equally between our three daughters. Aged 34, 31 and 27, they are all grown up now, so the stuff about who would be their guardians is obviously redundant.

So that's it. Or rather, that was it. To be honest, I'd never given it a moment's thought since we had it drawn up just before the turn of the millennium, but not long ago Sarah said we should update the will and I agreed, imagining we just needed to bring it into the 21st century, a bit like renewing a library card.

The family gathers for the reading of Harlan Thrombey's will in the 2019 whodunit Knives Out It transpired that Sarah had been giving it some consideration and wanted us to think about a new provision. What she wanted – if possible – was a stipulation that the surviving spouse would be obliged to pass on the whole estate.