I sit here, looking proudly out the window at my little car with no bandage on my foot (although my nail is a funny kind of yellow colour) and feel that life is returning to some kind of normality (whatever that is). I even have the news that the FIL is finally out of hospital and doing well and (even more amazing given the summer we have had) the sun is shining too…!
I have spent the last week on the phone (or so it seems) and have had very long involved discussions with the insurance company. They told me that with 2 bent doors that my car would almost certainly be a write off (in fact, they didn’t even want to see it to tell me that) and they would give me the market value (somewhere between £800 and £1500). At that point, if I wished to get the car repaired, I could buy the car back off them (for say somewhere between £500 and £1000) leaving me about £300 to get it fixed myself. However, the car would be registered on the insurers database as a write off and when it gets to 25 years old (next year) I would not be able to get either classic insurance or an agreed value – in fact the car would only ever be worth salvage value. Now, you can imagine I wasn’t best pleased with all this info, so I took it down my local garage for an estimate as he thinks he’s a bit of a wizard at bodywork.
“First thing we need to do”, P@GM said, “is to get it weatherproof. A gap you can put your arm through at the top of the door is bound to let in water..” “You leave it here and I’ll bend the doors back a bit and give you a proper estimate. Come back at 4 pm. That’ll be fine”.
So, since A&T (remember them?) were down for the weekend we went out for the day and at 4pm drove back to the garage. There was my little car and it looked pretty good. In fact, it looked better than pretty good – it looked just the right shape with the doors lining up and everything. Unusually for me I was lost for words and then saw P@GM …
“All fixed” says he. “Splutter, splutter” came out of my mouth. “How much??” I asked. “Well”, he said. “How does £160 sound?” “Amazing” says I, “that’s great!” “Ah bugger” says he “as I’m only going to charge you £30”. “£30” squeaks I. “Yep” he says, “when I got to work it went back easier than I thought – told you I was a magician, didn’t I?”
Magician he is for sure – I gave him a couple of bottles of wine too…and a kiss…..
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