It was about June 20th 2007 and some ridiculous woman at the insurance company had taken on our flood case, we had some loss adjuster chap who kept visiting, and every month or week that went by, the next time he arrived his face would be further bloated and his nose pinker, the floods in the west midlands in summer 2007 had really fucked things up. His life was to be shouted at by everyone who he went to see. As a consequence he was drinking heavily and as a direct result of that his marriage collapsed. Poor Bugger. We were flooded early on in the season, which comparatively speaking was good for us; we had fans and dehumidifiers, the rest of the later flood victims, less so, there was a British shortage and they were sending SIOS calls to America begging for more equipment. Unprecedented, thats what they told us; a 1 in 100 year event, which didn’t help us sell our house about 10 years later, insurance companies have long and vengeful memories, and they talk to each other, lessons learnt vicariously amongst the sector, bloody insurance sector. Funnily enough we did ok out of our flood, we lost a few “things” but nothing really precious, aside from our honeymoon photos, which I regret, but as they were all taken over 2 days, and we are wearing just 2 outfits because Mrs T gave me a digital camera, and I wiped all the photos 2 days before we went home, so we dashed all over Paxos taking the same shots over and over. That was my fault, but it would still be great to check them out again.

Anyway, this lunatic woman in the insurance office who I think was called Heather, but I may be wrong, she was our point of contact and had a terrible knack of not answering the phone when I called up to complain about this and that. But one of my greatest insurance triumphs was when we tried to claim for about 100 records which were on the bottom shelves and flood damaged, the sleeves knackered, the vinyl covered in flood water, dirty sewage bastard mud. Now in my cataloguing system, the cheaper, less listened to charity shop buys, such as music from the Nomads of Niger and some very ropey Music from 17th Century Leipzig. In short stuff I wasn’t particularly fond of, but, none the less, formed part of my musical journey, tracking the path from The Wombles to Can and everything in between. I told Insurance Heather that I had lost 100 records and what price was she going to put on these, bearing in mind most of them were Car Boot or Chazza buys, I didn’t tell her that.

She came back the following day with an offer of £1 per record. ONE POUND!! Irritated and insulted and perplexed with the offer I immediately sent her a list of all the records I had lost, and asked her to replace them all, i’d rather have like for like than a derisory offer, I think that’s what the insurers had promised, and considering that most of them were rather unusual I told tham that it was the least they could do.

The days went by and then on the Friday afternoon I received a phone call from Heather at Insurance Towers somewhere.

“We’ve reviewed the situation and we thing that an offer of £5 per record is a reasonable offer, due to the eclectic selection that you have”

Well I wasn’t going to refuse that, gift horse in the mouth, and all that, needless to say, I’m still buying white elephants and other nonsense from charity shops all over Worcestershire and Herefordshire, you can never have too much vinyl.