Fireworks are a strange thing to spend money on, when you stop and look at it.
They cost a fortune. They're over in minutes. Whether it's Diwali or Bonfire Night or Chinese New Year, the story's the same: a lot of money, a short burst of light, and then it's gone and half the street's dog is hiding under a table.
That last part is the bit I keep thinking about. You buy the display. Someone else, something else, gets the noise. And whoever's under the table didn't get asked.
A lot of the decisions people bring me are shaped like that.
You take the job in another city, and it's the right call, and your partner quietly rebuilds their whole week around it while the children start again at a new school. You retire at sixty because you've earned it and you're tired, and your wife, who's a good deal younger than you, suddenly has a husband at home five years before she'd planned on one. None of that makes the decision wrong. It just means you were never the only person inside it.
I see it most plainly with money passing down a family. A parent helps one child onto the ladder, for perfectly good reasons, and the other two say nothing and notice everything. Or a parent decides,
quite rightly, to spend the lot while they're alive to enjoy it, and somewhere a grown-up child who'd built a quiet little plan around an inheritance rubs it out and doesn't mention it.
The number's the easy part. It's the people standing around the number that make it complicated.
So a fair bit of what happens in our meetings is me trying to get those people into the room when they aren't actually in it. What does your wife make of this. Have you told the children, or are you hoping they'll work it out. Who else does this land on.
I'm not there to talk anyone out of the fireworks. People are allowed their fireworks. I just want them to have thought about the dog.