‘Mortgages”, at the turn of this century, used to be a byword for the most boring conversations on earth. That’s how you measured whether or not you’d got old and lost your vim and rebellion: did you, or did you not, spend Saturday night at a dinner party, talking about interest rates?
Now, everyone is talking about mortgages, and these conversations are wild. They’ve got pace, they’ve got pathos, they’ve got suspense and dread, they’ve got a heap of intergenerational struggle. It’s like Chekhov with decimals.
The keener reader will recall that, as I was seeking a remortgage in July, a mistake was made on our application and I had a choice, to either resubmit at a higher rate, or change my surname to Mr Z’s. Of course I chose the second, and he was tickled pink and texted his whole family going: “There’s a new Mrs Higham!”, and they all thought he’d got divorced again, and reprimanded him mildly.
That mortgage was already way too expensive and I was going to have to borrow money off my mother, which is of course incredibly humiliating at nearly 50, leavened only slightly by the fact that everybody I know is borrowing money off their mother. That “at least the pensioners will do all right” narrative could take a bit of shaking up: they did all right for about five minutes, then their adult children started hammering their doors down.
I was telling a friend about it, with my son in the room. Ideal world, I wouldn’t have discussed it in front of the children, but because they so performatively don’t listen to me, I sometimes forget I’m still audible. “Do you borrow money off Grandma a lot?” he asked afterwards. The last time I did it was in 1994, but obviously I didn’t want to tell him that in case he freaked out. “The last time I did it was in 1994,” came out of my mouth anyway. It’s weirdly hard to lie to your kids. It’s not morals, I don’t think, more a lingering refusal to accept that they’re separate, sentient beings, not just satellite bits of your own brain that you grew for a laugh.
Anyway, to repurpose the axiom, want to make HSBC laugh? Tell them your plans. They sat on the application for eight weeks, then refused it on Black Friday, or mind-melt Monday, or however we’re tagging these rolling cycles of catastrophe so that we can tell them apart. My previous husband, conversely, applied in the middle of September and was approved two weeks later. I had to conclude that they’d institutionally taken his side in our years-ago divorce, which on the one hand is fair, but on the other, are banks allowed to do that?
Now we were wondering at what point “no fixed rate” becomes “no fixed abode”, and distress calls were going off like the twilight barking in The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Friends were constantly texting: “Do you need a better mortgage adviser? We had a great one,” and I was fighting back the urge to reply: “Thanks dude, but they’re not wizards. They can’t turn 6% back into 2%.”
I thought that, in our age bracket, it would just be feckless divorcees, but no, everyone and their dog is heavily leveraged, except, weirdly, my sister and brother, who each snagged a really manageable five-year fix at the beginning of the year. If they’d been more fortunate than me in some more trivial matter, such as, I don’t know, finding the last mini-bratwurst in Lidl, I’d resent the hell out of them, but with something so consequential, I’m happy for them, generous in my misfortune. Besides, I need all our mum’s money for me.
Actually, classic dinner-party ennui was redefined in the 2010s by my stepdaughter, who said: “Your dinner parties are so boring; it’s all Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, and bitching about people who sound just like you.” It turned out Brexit and mortgages were just waiting to collide in one dazzlingly appalling conversation, but I’ll tell you what: it’s not boring.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
