What is the truth? The truth should be something that is concrete, that cannot be unaltered, an eternal constant that runs through your life like the lettering in a stick of Blackpool rock. However, one soon discovers that the truth lives in many varieties. My truth might be very different to yours, right? It’s about perspective and it is about presenting the facts in a cogent, unbiased way.
With that preamble out of the way, my attention was turned today to one of the magazines aimed at the retail trade. The story of our tragedy was featured but given a slightly different slant. I am a member of a trade association and I signed up and paid my dues because when I started as a shopowner, I thought it would be the right thing to do. I thought it would help me in my industry because I was inexperienced and was willing for any pointers.
When the disaster happened, my local rep from the trade association quickly got in touch. Of course, there was much sympathy to our plight, but the neverending theme put to me by him was that we must restart our newsrounds immediately. Forget the fact that you are homeless, forget the fact that you have no livelihood, no electricity, nowhere for your 13th-month-old baby to play. Forget all your life’s possessions spread over the wreckage of your former home, moved by the builders to make room for emergency structural work. Forget the unending dealings with loss adjustors who only exist to fulfil one purpose: to wriggle and squirm out of their moral obligation to pay out on legitimate insurance claims. Forget the emotional impact the catastrophe has had on you. Forget everything that might be at the front of your mind. The only thing that is important is to restart the newsrounds.
And so my utter loathing and contempt for the newspaper industry really began. I know what journalists and the press is like. I’ve been a part of it once and knew what that particular game is about. But if you think that news journalists are the bottom of the barrel, that’s nothing compared to the wholesales, the people that make sure the newspapers get supplied to newsagents.
I quickly realised that for them cash is king and my plight was a blip in their gameplan. Got no shop? No problem you can use part of our warehouse to make up your newsrounds. Can’t drive and are required to make a 60 mile round trip to the temporary accommodation you are living in to the wholesaler and your shop? The rep from the aforementioned trade association will drive you there everyday! (Yeah, right) Of course, there are all manner of logistics when running a newsround. Having the cash to buy the papers is useful. All my cashflow died when the car struck the building. Having a working computer system on which to run your database and generate daily newsrounds is crucial. My computer was back at the powerless shop and where I was living was no bigger than a one bedroom flat housing myself, my wife, my baby, my mother and two dogs – plus various bags of possessions we’d scrambled together from the wreckage.
During the first week, I was phoned on a daily basis by the two newspaper wholesalers I deal with and my assocation rep, insisting I restart my rounds immediately. I couldn’t give them a definite answer as to what I was doing as I was about to be made homeless for the third time in the space of seven days (we moved to the in-laws first but they didn’t want us, then we went to a holiday chalet but they were closing at the end of October). So I was under a lot of pressure just to find us somewhere to live while also battling with two insurance companies who both refused to concede responsibility for paying up for temporary accommodation.
In terms of the newspaper rounds, various options were given to me. All of them were either impractical or just plain going to ruin my business. While some profess altruism, there are many out there who would steal your customer base in an instant if the opportunity came your way, so I had to play my cards close to my chest. At one point, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to re-open.
And so I read this article today where the association rep is presented as the hero of the hour, even helping find us temporary accommodation (an utter out and out lie). Not quite the truth, but a variation on it. Yes, he offered impractical help and solutions to problems that were no solution for me. The only good thing the association did for me was to give me a payment of £450 from the benevolent fund, which didn’t even cover half my monthly commercial mortgage payment. That makes me sound ungrateful, but I am not. I am grateful for any help that I can use or find practical, but one soon learns that helpful people are often serving other motives and one realises that the wheels of business will grind up the likes of me; the innocent, trusting, naive beginner like myself. I felt bullied by the people who are supposed to be supporting me. Business doesn’t work like that though…
Now I could fire off an email of complaint and whinge and moan and curse, but there’s no point. The damage was done when the car picked us out. It is obvious that the article was just a puff piece to promote the work of the trade association involved. That’s all well and good, but it hurts when its your efforts alone that’s gotten you to this point.
Re-opening was made able by myself, The Missus, my mother and my member of staff working hard to clean and rearrage the shop and coming up with practical solutions to impractical problems. At the moment, we are trying to get an interim payment from the insurers but I fear that despite our efforts, the game is up. Even if they do pay out, I don’t know if the cash sum will enable me to sustain the business. I need sustained cashflow, it is our lifeblood.
Yesterday, we served 28 customers and took about a sixteenth of the takings we would normally take. We normally average 300 customers a day. I’ve got paper boys and staff to pay. At this rate, I’ll have to borrow money just to keep them on board.
I can see no way out of this.
Meanwhile, the rumour from the village is that the cullprits were drug dealers, rehoused in the village by the local police for whatever nefarious reasons. This might explain the non-reply we’ve had from the boys in blue. The village appears to be host to 4 paedophiles and have a number of safe houses for those who are on the fringes of decent soceity. Nice, innit?
Category: Diary
And so now I find myself rising from my bed at 4.30am for today is the day we restart the business. I don’t do this because I want to do this, but because if I don’t, we will lose just about everything we’ve ever worked for. It is a sobering thought but when you put your life into bricks and mortar and a piece of human filth smashes that to bits in a “road traffic accident”, you start to wonder why you bother? You see, the police don’t see this as criminal damage because a car was involved. It is a road traffic accident, so that makes it OK. The Home Office has deemed this crime as such but it is no different than if a man had taken a sledgehammer to the front of our shop is it? Still no contact from the police. Even our loss assessor suspects something is not quite right with all of this.
Equipped with rechargeable lanterns and wind-up torches, myself and The Missus worked in the semi-darkness, the power still cut, sorting out newspapers and magazines and pulling together the delivery rounds. All but one of the newspaper boys turned up, but that’s teenagers for you. You phone them, leave messages and still they can’t be bothered. Oh well, what can you do about it?
The shop can only open during the hours of daylight. Being an ingenious so-and-so, I am running the till and other electronics off a number of car batteries. The shop opens and within the space of half-an-hour two customers come into cancel their newspaper delivery. Some people offer support and are disgusted that the local Co-Op were quick to jump on our bones by starting to supply newspapers on the first day of our non-trading.
The thing you soon realise is that everyone out there is quick to nick your business when you are down. The local newspaper printer/wholesaler put out leaflets telling our customers that they could get their newspapers at another local shop. Completely kill our business, why don’t you?
So today feelings are mixed. There was a strong feeling of comaraderie when we were restocking the shop with newspapers and magazines and it felt good that we could continue, but the whinging and moaning customers who only seem to care about their newspapers being delivered really grind you down.
We are going through the motions until everything can be restored. I feel strange, somewhat detached from proceedings as if I am viewing this through someone else’s eyes.
Is this really happening? Sometimes it feels quite dreamlike.
Today is also The Missus’s birthday. She received a letter from her grandmother wishing us well and it made her cry. Sometimes I don’t think the emotional impact has come out as we have been too busy just coping with moving and restarting the business. The other afternoon, while sitting at some traffic lights, I had a flashback to the accident. I can still hear the noise of the impact when I close my eyes and I now freeze and panic when I hear or see the emergency services and their all-too familiar flashing blue lights.
The wound is raw.
Now I am a simple guy. While I am not particularly proud or arrogant, I like to think that I am not stupid. However, my dealings with the loss adjustor and the explanation of buildings insurance by my own loss assessor made me realise that the world of insurance is a dark and mysterious place, littered with small print and exclusions that guarantee that the insurer doesn’t pay.
So I have insured my home/shop for £xxx amount of pounds to cover a full rebuild. If the whole thing gets knocked down then it will cost £xxx to rebuild. I understand that. You also think to yourself, “Well that £xxx I am insured for is the maximum amount of cash they are going to pay out if something bad happens”. Nope, it doesn’t work like that at all.
I am writing this blog entry so that anyone searching on google for underinsurance can understand the concept precisely. Also, anyone out there with buildings insurance might want to nip off and check out their policy. You see, when something bad happens, a loss adjustor tootles in and does some calculations. He says something like: “By my calculations, the rebuild value of this building is £xyz and you only have insured for £xxx, so the difference between that is 60%, so you’ll have to pay the rest for the building work.”
The thing is that the rebuild value of our property has suddenly rocketed up by £45,000 in 12 months. While property prices fall, I am in a unique position that the value to rebuild my shop/home is more than it would to actually buy it without the business. To me, this makes no sense. But that’s how the world of insurance works.
Now I can imagine that there are a lot of people out there sitting on buildings insurance policies that they’ve put in place when they first get a mortgage or move into a property. Now no-one has ever told me that the cost of rebuilding goes up exponentially every year and that my policy should be adjusted accordingly. And I reckon, there are a lot of people out there sitting on a policy that is virtually worthless.
My warning to you if you have a policy that is older than, say, five years, get a surveyor in to calculate the current rebuilt value of your property and adjust your policy accordingly. For me, in just twelve months, I’ve lost about 35% of the value of the policy, when my loss assessor takes his cut, I’ll probably have to pay 50% for the work.
My only hope is that the Motor Insurance Bureau will pay the shortfall because otherwise I am ruined. Now I am not asking for your sympathy, but I have always believed in taking out full insurance and paying through the nose for protection. However, it seems that when that catastrophe does indeed seek you out, you might as well put all that insurance money in an old sock and gamble it on black on the roulette table when the disaster strikes because that’s how I feel buildings insurance goes.
The same can be said of business interruption cover. I kind of expected an interim payment to help cover the commercial mortgage, but that doesn’t pay out until I restart trading. So, if you do end up up the creek with out the proverbial paddle, you will have to start trading before you get a penny. This is disastrous if you are in a business like ours that requires constant cashflow.
On the other hand, the company dealing with out contents insurance (and are also dealing with our temporary housing) have been exemplary.
Tomorrow, we are restarting the shop. The newspapers are scheduled for delivery in the morning and myself and The Missus will be working in the dark, with the aid of a couple of wind up torches, trying to get the newsrounds together. Then we plan to open the shop, running the till off a car battery and closing when the daylight fades.
Great life, innit?
And so the nonsense continues to engulf my life.
“When are the newsrounds coming back?” they bleat.
How can I answer that when I have no permanent home? My business has no power? I look at my thirteen month old baby playing in her cot in a foreign room in a foreign place, oblivious to my troubles, and I think to myself: “Why should I give a fuck about these people?” I don’t. I only care for my baby and my family. Everything is peripheral now.
We have a new loss adjustor because I had no faith in the last one. This one is no better, so it is time to fight fire with fire. We rise to the fight. We love a good scrap. The fights we win and lose define who we are. Again, we cannot get any business interuption payments until we actually work the business. How do you work a business that is smashed beyond all control? We had to take out an emergency overdraft to cover the commercial mortgage. The business manager says: “Even if you don’t recover, we are alright. You have a small mortgage. We’ll get our money back and more just selling your property at land value.”
The vultures continue to circle…
The only glimmer of hope involves getting someone on our side. I speak to my accountant (he’s good, he’s expensive, he drives a very expensive car and has a motorbike, despite being too old for either). He tells me what I already know that the loss adjustor is only looking after the bank and insurance company’s interest because we have our insurance and mortgage covered by the same company. My accountant reckons that we could “clean up” with this if we get the right people working on side. I’m not interested in cleaning up, just getting my business and home back in one piece so that I can support my baby.
He gets me to talk to his partner at the accountancy who puts a man in touch with me. This fellow is a Greek Cypriot from North London. He shares a name with my best friend when I was seven years old. Like my accountant, we have that spark, we can talk the talk. Even though I have never met this guy, I instantly trust him. The same can’t be said for either of the loss adjustors. Shame he’s going to take 10% of the cost of the claim, but the stakes are higher than 10% and when the odds are stacked against you, you need someone to level the playing field, even if it does cost a lot.
Late on Friday, the new loss adjustor phones to introduce himself. He warns me that there is going to be a massive shortfall in the insurance cover to the building work, despite there being a fairly high figure set aside for that work. You only get 60% of that.
Luckily, I am a pretty clued up guy and so I’ve already put in a claim with the Motor Insurance Bureau. This organisation was set up to pay out compensation to those of us affected by uninsured or unknown drivers. I put my claim in last night. When I tell the loss adjustor, he appears to whoop with joy.
I also wonder why he insists that we can throw away all the chocolate and sweets from our business, despite them being unaffected by the crash and only needing a wipe off with a cloth. Surely, he should be saving money there?
It was heartbreaking to send back all the magazines to the wholesaler. They sent out a van especially to collect the stock and then took it off so they could credit me. They have been very good to me in the past and I cannot fault them.
The thing I find the hardest though is waking up in the mornings and crying.
I do not like this at all…
Let me come clean. I am Darren Lock. I am Darren Lock, the owner of Horsford News. Up until 3.15am on 19th October 2008, I worked seven days a week for virtually nothing in a newsagents in a village of Horsford, just outside Norwich in Norfolk. I worked to pay the mortgage to put a roof over my family’s head. It is a tough life. Customers are unforgiving, and at worst, rude. I’ve lost more money running this business than I needed too, but you realise that running a newsagents is a bit like plugging a dam with your finger only to find another breach happens down the line.
On Sunday morning, a speeding car struck my house at 75mph. We know it was that speed because that’s what the speedometer was stuck out when they cut the female driver from the car. In the car were three children and another passenger, who fled the scene. I saw him run off as I walking into my living room to see that there was no side life on my house.
We were evacuated. The building deemed unsafe. But I take my hat off to the building workers who shored up the structure and weatherproofed it. It broke my heart to see baby Verity’s high chair and toys on display from the street below. Heck, I even made the lead news story on Anglia Tonight on Sunday. I am a star – whoopee fucking do!
I don’t think I’ll ever recover from it. But then the nightmare only starts.
For two days, we have been fighting with insurers to get temporary accommodation (luckily we have somewhere very temporary to live) and I’ve been under increasing pressure to reopen the business.
This is life at its rawest. But in this Idiot Nation, populated by morons and noddies, the culprit will probably get a tap on the head and sent on their way – their life completely unaffected by this catastrophe. Remember, this person was driving uphill at 75mph in a 20mph zone.
We are lucky that none of us were killed…for that I thank God.
If you have children of a certain age, then I am certain you may have come into contact with a TV programme called “In the Night Garden”. At the beginning, I used to just let it wash over me but then the deeper meaning and tragedy of the lead protagonist struck me.
The show begins at night time with a small child (different for every show) about to go to sleep. Their parent strokes their hand and so the show begins. They are told to imagine a boat the size of their hand and it cuts to Iggle Piggle alone at sea:
The boat sails off into the distance and Iggle Piggle joins his friends “In the Night Garden”.
Now this seems all harmless, but when you think about the narrative construct of the show there is a dark sadness running through it. Firstly, Iggle Piggle doesn’t actually exist in this programme for he is a dream in the child’s imagination and so therefore one can deduce that Iggle Piggle’s adventures in the garden are his dream. So you have a dream within a dream.
In the first dream, Iggle Piggle is happy and having all sorts of adventures in his dream world, The Night Garden, but in reality (or the first layer of dream reality) he is in fact alone, abandoned on the sea at night. At the end of every show, all the characters go to sleep except Iggle Piggle, because he’s already asleep, alone on the dark sea. Now what I find upsetting is that the baby at the beginning of the show continually dreams of poor old Iggle Piggle being alone on the sea. He is destined to be alone in the imagination forever until his dreams bring him the friends and company of which he desires.
So it is a programme about the dream world, the nature of desire and isolation.
Whoudathunkit, eh?
Here’s a link to more of my thoughts on “In the Night Garden”
Now the story of Shaun Dykes broke earlier in the week and it is a signpost, a portent even, of just how disconnected we have become from reality. The story goes like this: a depressed young man goes to the top of a car park and threatens to throw himself off. The police attempt to talk him down, but all the time a crowd jeers at him, fires off expletives and urges him to do the dreaded deed. An hour later, the young man jumps and the baying crowd rush forward to video his grisly remains with ghoulish glee. The story has been nicely summed up by the BBC.
Now I’ll be the first to raise my hand to admit I’ve made some choice comments when a suicide has delayed my tube journey. “Why don’t they ever wait till it is off-peak?” and “The service isn’t that bad…!” etc. but this is beyond me. Mr Dykes friends are saying that they believe their friend could have been talked down and that the crowd are directly responsible for his death. How did we come to behave like this? I have the theory that media such as the Internet and YouTube and whatever else has totally desensitised us (or is in the process of desensitising us all, young or old, male or female). Or perhaps collecting horrific post-suicide images has become the new Top Trumps of this digital (de)generation? I don’t know. Where’s the compassion? Where’s the empathy? Where’s the reasoning?
It scares me…and now an apt pop video…