Driving me crazy

26 April 2008

Melissa Kite leads a Real Life

Oh Christ, I thought. I turned to the car behind and asked if the driver saw the accident. Slowly, he rolled down the window: ‘Si, si, signora, I see eeeeeverything!’

OK, then. Let’s just say that my expectations of recompense were hardly sky-high at the start of the process, but I did expect something from my insurance company, which had promised me in its promotional material that its car insurance deals were ‘bonza’, which I took to mean good. So I rang in all the details, including some fiendishly unpronounceable Polish and Italian names, a process that took most of an afternoon.

Three days later I received the following call from my friendly northern call centre:

‘Hello, is that Melinda?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Oh, hello, Miranda, and how are you today?...Now, we’ve had a little looook at your insurance claim and I’m afraid to say we’ve discovered some rather unusual things about it.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, our investigations department has done a lot of work on this and I’m afraid they’ve discovered that the car that hit you is, in fact, Polish. Also, the insurance company is Polish. And we rang the driver and he’s...’

‘Polish?’

‘Oo, how did you know?!’

One incident would be explainable. But there are so many more. Just this month I received notice from the owners of the car park I use in town to say that they had decided, against all legal precedent, to rewrite my contract midway through its term and hike up the charges. ‘It’s the retail price index, you see.’ Of course, it is.

And what am I to make of driving to Sainsbury’s yesterday to buy a bag of rabbit food and emerging to find a parking ticket for £50 on my windscreen? I had parked in the supermarket’s own car park but had failed to display a ‘valid free parking ticket’ which I should have obtained by pushing a button on a machine which wasn’t working. So, having bought a small sack of rabbit food for £2.50 I must now pay Sainsbury’s/ Euro parks £50 for my insolence. That’s some expensive rabbit food.

Fine. I accept what you’re trying to tell me, Ken. It’s no use persisting. I will end up impoverished, uninsurable and mentally deranged. But you know what? I’m going to do it anyway. Because it’s not about driving any more. It’s about everything. If you want me to let go of my car keys you will have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands. ‘The right of the people to keep and drive cars’ just became my Second Amendment.

Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.