You are allowed to enjoy this…

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”