Life in the speedy lane

When I bought my house I arranged house insurance. When the house started to decay due to damp caused by damage to the roof, I made an insurance claim. It turned out:

I had bought the insurance from the Insurance Broker who collects my premium every year. Their interest in the claim is to demand an immediate £190, reasons unknown.

The Insurance Broker organised the insurance from the Insurer who when contacted tells you that this money was an extra premium... just in case (?). They tell you to deal with…

The Claims Handler. These are very nice people who will check their systems to see if they have any information and act on it… WHEN YOU CALL THEM EVERY DAY.

The Claims Handler tells you to get a quote. You happen to know a Preferred Contractor, the biggest scammers known to man, because he is going to do the related insurance work for the Neighbour. You send in their outrageous quote and …

After you chase them, the Claims Handler calls in the Loss Adjustor. Now you actually see a person who comes out to your house. You give the Loss Adjustor tea and talk to him very nicely about his family and smile a lot and then he goes away and recommends to the Claims Handler that the claim be approved. When you ring the Claims Handler…

They agree that yes they have heard from the Loss Adjustor and will now send his report onto the Underwriter because of the sums involved.

Meanwhile the Neighbour’s Claims Handler has sent the Neighbour a nasty letter suggesting that she is trying to claim your works under her insurance just because you and she have tried to coordinate matters to save both Insurers money (grrrrr).

At this stage you discover that luckily you and the Neighbour have the same Loss Adjustor firm and hence will have the same Preferred Contractor.

You contact the Preferred Contractor and manage to get them to talk to Network Rail and don’t even get me started on Network Rail because that’s a story even more painful than this one.

After a while you call again and the Claims Handler tells you they have (long ago) received some queries and instructions from the Underwriter to the Loss Adjustor, which they will now pass on.

You continue to play this game for a while of chasing the middleman to sometimes pass on the communication from one party to the other and sometimes request the mysterious, nasty, god like “we have been prejudiced” Underwriter to respond.

Then the Loss Adjustor goes on holiday.

We leave the story, some 5 months and 2 new damp rooms after it started, with the news that the Claims Handler says that the Underwriter has responded instructing the Loss Adjustor to proceed to instruct the Preferred Contractor to commence the works… with the caveat that he has “raised some queries”… with the Preferred Contractor about the start work on the Neighbour’s property and with me going overseas for a week thus likely introducing a further month’s delay.

This has still been better than dealing with Orange.

il neige, il pleut, il fait gris ....

I've just got back from France again. I like saying that. It implies that I've had some sort of reunion with the sun.

This time I flew into Perpignan quite late, and as we had a stop in the middle of the road as we were driving back. It's still sort of weird looking up at the sky and seeing all the stars upside down. In fact it's just a totally different sky. Fancy something as immutable as the sky changing.

On the downside, I got bitten by a dog! A tiny yappy Yorkshire terrier no less. Good grief. I said it didn't like me because I've from Lancashire.

I went across to my local pub tonight for a quick pint. This village is suffering badly because so many of the people here are connected with the building trade, and a lot of the regulars have been out of work since before xmas. So I did my bit for the local economy and had two pints.

Last week I got on the train to come home and sat (something bizarre has happened - these days not only can I actually get *on* the train, but sometimes I can even get a seat!) next to man, as you do. The funny thing was that he was reading the exact same book that I am at the moment, Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady". Not only that, but he was up to exactly the same page! How cool is that? We had a right old natter about it.

This is worth mentioning, not only for the amazing coincidence, but also for the fact that I found a friendly person on the train. That's not to say that, deep down, the english aren't friendly. It's just that they almost never initiate contact with strangers (unless they're drunk and coming home from the rugby). I suppose it comes from living in such an overcrowded country. To be perfectly honest I feel more at home with the Scots.