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Catherine Simpson

Scottish novelist and memoirist; author of Hold Fast: Motherhood, My Autistic Daughter and Me

Jun 28, 2026

20:28
Are there some misconceptions around wheels that you'd really love to clear up in your day-to-day? I mean, surely there are some things where people don't quite get it, and you'd like, if you've got the opportunity, to clear it up.
20:37
Yeah, sure.
20:38
I mean, the first one is some people don't bother to write one, which I think my views on that are probably quite clear so far in our conversation.
20:47
What people tend to do is kind of over or under specify.
20:51
So give really detailed instructions or really broad brush and forget like mementos and kind of family recipes or like those types of things.
21:00
And more often than not, we see people get into a dispute over, you know, a musical instrument or a piece of jewelry rather than the monetary amount that they're due to receive.
21:11
And I think the other big one is that people assume that it will be really fast when it gets to that point.
23:31
How does that play into this whole thing? I mean, what is an estate, broadly speaking, and how can that change the picture of a will and what people might expect to inherit or not inherit?
19:12
Mm-hmm.
19:13
I thought that I was treated quite cruelly by the staff, I felt.
19:18
I wasn't listened to.
19:19
There was staff coming and going and chatting and laughing, you know, amongst themselves af- and then eventually one shouted across.
19:27
I'd been in labor, whatever, 10 hours or something, and they shouted across, "That baby's not out in half an hour, and I'm coming with the forceps." And, and, uh, this was 4:00 in the morning, and I hadn't got any effective pain relief.
19:41
It was all quite...
19:41
It was hostile.

32 MINS LATER

52:01
Mm-hmm.

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