The house we live in

I have a confession to make. This isn’t easy for me so please be kind, here goes. I don’t have a mmm…. Oh, hold on a sec I don’t think I said it out loud. Mortgage. I don’t have a mortgage. Ah, that feels so much better, I’ve been wanting to get that out in the open for ages, especially as I may have suggested a couple of times that I do have one, a mortgage I mean. Sorry, but that was just a sad attempt to appear normal, to seem to be like everyone else. The thing is I am a little over fifty, not sure how that happened, woke up one morning and I seemed to have aged considerably, the bank noticed, as they do, told me I couldn’t have a mortgage because I wouldn’t live long enough to pay it off, perhaps one of your children could get one on your behalf? I pointed out that my oldest child was eleven. The bank lifted its head, saw the problem, an eleven year old probably wouldn’t have enough time to pay off a mortgage either.

Interesting word mortgage. It is French via Latin, very old, of uncertain origin but of very clear meaning. Depending on who you ask. Directly translated it means death pledge. Not an easy sell for a modern day banking product. A touch on the honest side if you ask me, like driving to a fish and chip shop in your ‘Ford Fireball’ to buy some ‘Shark and Fat’ before joining a gym called ‘You’ll only come once. ‘ Mind you it doesn’t seem to have slowed the death pledge down, you would think the crash had never happened, banks are practically giving them away, just so long as you are between thirty and forty, don’t smoke, have any health issues (you know, like breathing), don’t have credit cards, a car, children, holidays or a race horse and don’t subscribe to netflix.

I know, I know, I am wilfully misrepresenting the etymology of mortgage, it should be dead pledge not death and it refers most probably to the paid debt being dead not the debtor but it is unlikely that the increasing number of families struggling to make repayments feel that way, to them I bet death pledge sounds about right. Houses are no longer just homes, they are investments, university funds, pensions. People are living longer and longer and as a result have to keep dipping because home is where the hoard is. My father who is quite possibly Methuselah’s older brother has remortgaged three times, usually after death has yet again failed to live up to its end of the bargain. He keeps on carving lumps of house off and buying things to supplement his withering heights, electric buggies, hearing aids, new teeth and eyes, candy crush saga but only because the name implied it was for the over 50’s and made him feel young again. At this rate the house will be gone before he is.

Strangely despite all of this I would really like a mortgage, you know, one of my own, a proper unaffordable one. But that’s banks for you, unlikely ever to lend to someone suffering from a terminal case of life. It is slightly ironic that they won’t let me make a death pledge in case I die, surely that is the whole point of pledging a house as collateral. Without a mortgage how am I expected to leave a huge debt to my family?