Having been admitted to hospital with a deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism for the second time in a couple of years, I was feeling a little discouraged about my immediate future. One thing that started to bother me was the realisation that I had made no will: I had the idea that for me to die intestate would cause all sorts of horrible complications for my wife.

So, trying to find a practical solution to what seemed to me to be a worrying problem, I jotted down what sounded like a reasonable, basic will in the back of a paperback book and asked the patient in the next bed to witness it. (Apparently just one witness signature is not enough, so my will would not have worked anyway, but I did not know this at the time.) …