Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Day of reckoning

Melissa Kite's Real Life

issue 03 April 2010

Goodness knows how I did it, but I seem to have organised my life so that it runs out annually and needs renewing before the first of April. I do grasp the significance of the end of the financial year and all that. But what I cannot work out is how I managed to co-ordinate the rest of my affairs to this heinous deadline as well.

Quite as if by magic, every insurance policy, yearly permit, pass or subscription I possess runs out about now. I’m never sure how this is possible because I cannot have done everything for the first time at the end of March — by which I mean buy a car, park a car, buy a horse, buy another horse, start my water supply, take out a 0 per cent credit card, get a ten-year passport, join Catholicmatch.com (for a laugh, OK?).

And yet I seem to have done precisely that, creating a period of unparalleled financial and administrative hell when my bank statement becomes so fraught with transactions it makes no more sense to me than the accounts of a multinational corporation. Little wonder I let all the envelopes marked ‘Urgent Renewal Documents Enclosed!’ pile up on the fridge like a mountain of papery doom until the last possible moment, expecting nothing but merciless exploitation from all concerned when I do start ringing the dreaded call centres.

But this year, when the day of reckoning came, something utterly bizarre happened. I made the first call to Aviva to renew my home-contents cover and it wasn’t any more expensive than last year, and a few days later some M&S vouchers arrived to thank me for my custom. So I rang them back for car insurance and within minutes they had offered me a deal that was less than half the price my current provider was quoting.

In a state of disbelief, I phoned Equine and Livestock to sort out Tara and Grace. Again, with no prompting, complaint or threat of desertion on my part, they offered to cut the cost of Tara’s policy from £700 to £136 as she is now classed as ‘a veteran horse’. I suspect this is not entirely flattering but I’m not complaining. They could have called her a geriatric old nag and I would have said yes, please. They then offered a reduction on Grace by way of a two-policy deal and a week later a cheque for £20 arrived in the post as a further refund for something called ‘policy plus’ which I had told them I no longer wanted, but had no idea I had already paid for.

How weird is that? I mean, I’m used to discovering hidden extras that have been foisted on me in the small print. But a company fessing up and quickly sending me a cheque to compensate?

Then the strangest thing of all happened. I received notification from Lambeth council that they had frozen my council tax. All right, so they had frozen it at £1,000. But where Lambeth town hall is concerned you take whatever small acts of mercy you can get.

Diligent local Conservatives tried to spoil it for me by putting a leaflet through my door pointing out that, far from being a good thing, this was in fact ‘blatant electioneering’. To them I say: look here, I’m more right-wing than John Redwood on public spending and I’m probably on Lambeth council’s top-ten list of subversive capitalist troublemakers.

But if the Baron Bonkers of Brixton want to freeze my council tax I’m not going to say, ‘How dare they, this is a blatant act of electioneering that just goes to show how corrupt these lefties really are.’ No. I’m going to say, ‘Blow me, they certainly are manipulative so-and-sos but at least they’re manipulating me by saving me money.’

Personally, I will take whatever’s going in this recession, be it cheap horse insurance or left-wing bribes, and I don’t particularly mind what people’s motives are in offering them to me.

The bottom line is that I was running a four-figure saving on last year. I say ‘was’ because, being the good citizen that I am, I decided to plough this capital straight back into the economy. I went directly to Russell & Bromley and selflessly stimulated the retail sector by purchasing three pairs of this season’s ‘must-have’ biker boots. And that’s when it all went wrong.

No sooner had I got home and filled up the recycling bin with correctly flattened shoe boxes than the little lady at the corner shop rang: ‘I’m so sorry, my dear, I’ve just realised I haven’t billed you for newspapers since last March.’ The running total was pretty much the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Paraguay.

Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

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