By Douglas Kruger
EVER wonder whether your life insurance might be an incentive for your spouse to pop you off? Maybe it’s just me.
I’m sure it’s nothing. Still, the fact is, my life is insured to the hilt. Couple that with those unsettling moments when, for no reason, my wife evaluates me across the room, her eyes blank, her expression impossible to read and it all feels a tad Murder She Wrote.
If I catch her doing it, she shakes her head, smiles too brightly and asks if I’d like a sandwich.
Again, I’m sure it’s nothing.
Then there’s the planning. Places she’d go and things she dreams of doing if ever I were to suffer a tragic farming accident and she had to move on with her life. It’s an odd thing to say, because I don’t farm.
She assures me that it’s all meant in good humour, and that there’s a very low chance such a gruesome demise would ever befall me. “Honestly, less than 30%,” she says. But I have noticed that she factors it into her purchasing decisions, saying: “Too expensive now. But once you’ve had your tragic farming accident…”
“Don’t you mean ‘if’?”
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The rest of that evening’s episode of Gogglebox was somewhat strained. Also, I’ve stopped taking walks in the ӣƵ countryside. You can jog just as effectively in a subterranean car-park.
Nevertheless, I very nearly did meet my untimely demise a few weeks back. No farming angle, though. A car thief tried to jump the gun and reduce my wife’s timelines. I’ll explain.
It all began when I was ten. AC/DC released their immortal anthem Thunderstruck, and the first time I heard it, my pupils dilated with the thrill. This was something so savage, so pure, so gloriously angry and yet so perfectly controlled. It lit me up. I knew I had to hear them live, at least once in my lifetime.
Fast forward some 30-plus years, chuck in a few questionable insurance policies and not only had we come to ӣƵ but my favourite rock icons were performing in Wembley. For the first time in my life, they were a short plane hop and a small bag of easyJet pretzels away.
The crowds these legends drew were phenomenal. We started counting branded T-shirts at ӣƵ Airport before dawn, then saw hundreds more at the baggage carousels in London.
It was impossible to get accommodation near the stadium, so we checked in at a hotel over an hour’s travel away. Even so, the place was swarming with fans, decked out in their kit, ready for the night of a lifetime.
It happened as we waited for our first bus. Some kid in a hoodie thought he’d steal a hatchback, just a few blocks away.
I was standing in a drop-off zone near the main road. My back was to the action as I blissfully hummed Money Talks. Suddenly, my wife saw something that made her frown.
She watched the errant driver mount a curb on the left, thump back down onto the road, weave through traffic, narrowly avoid a pole on the other side, then shoot directly up the drop-off zone, straight toward me. No hooting, no swerving. He actually sped up as he got closer.
My wife pulled me out of harm’s way, just in time, so the good news is that she apparently will save my life if the chips are down. The bad news is I don’t know for how much longer. Because I swear there was a moment of hesitation while she did the maths, weighing early valuations and withdrawals against future matured claims.
I’m troubled by the possibility that the conclusion she reached was less “oh no, I couldn’t possibly live without him” and more “not yet”.
Still. I’m alive. I got to see AC/DC. I made it back home. My proverbial farming accident did not take place in a drop-off zone, somewhere between Brentford and Wembley.
Two minutes after my narrow miss, a gazillion police cars blared by in a swarm, their flashing lights painting the London graffiti and the faces of the astonished onlookers.
“That was incredible,” I said. “And, thank you… for saving my life.”
She narrowed her eyes, looked at me with distant appraisal, nodded very slowly. Not yet… Not yet…
I love my little hobbit. Worship the very ground she walks on. She is the primary beneficiary of all my adoration, as well as every red penny accrued in my policies to date. But I fear her in equal measure.
There’s also the matter of the Springboks coming to ӣƵ soon. Oh, I’ve seen the way she looks at them on TV. And she would only be single and available in the aftermath of, say, a spousal parachute jump gone wrong. Or a tragic farming accident.
So I continue as best I can, day by day. Glancing over my shoulder. Sniffing the contents of sandwiches. Avoiding any place vaguely agricultural. And I’m grateful for every new dawn. Every new debit order that goes off the account, swelling a still unclaimed policy.
Naturally, she forbade me to write this. Doubly forbade me from submitting it. But I plan to attach it to the leg of a pigeon and fly it to the offices of the JEP. Let’s just call it life insurance against my life insurance. Seriously, I don’t farm. I want everyone to know that.
Anyway, gotta go. She’s coming.
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Douglas Kruger is a professional speaker, and the author of several books, all available on Amazon and Audible. Born in Johannesburg, he now lives in St Helier, where he churns out YouTube videos from his apartment, provided the seagulls aren’t shrieking too loudly.
