pumpkinstrokemarrow

Then we move onto insurance for the house, which we have insured with Halifax, one of many outfits which used to be mutual & friendly and now has share holders. Some years ago I queried the rising cost at their shop and the helpful lady said 'Oh dear. You seem to have a very old policy. Let me have a quick look'. In short order, as I recall, the cost of renewal was halved or something and I was not impressed. A fit of nostalgia for the days when you could trust your insurance company to play fair and you did not have to think about it. So this year, once again, they send us a reminder. Terribly sorry, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are going to have to hike the charges.

Not best pleased to have to disturb my reveries about my next concrete art work, I decide that I had better take a peek at one of those comparison sites. Fairly quickly find myself inside a well put together site, put together by Tesco. All a bit tedious telling them all the stuff they need to know, but, nevertheless, well put together. I notice in passing that fashions in these matters have clearly changed. 20 years ago all the serious action was in subsidence. Now the action seems to be in watercourses. Is there a watercourse between 200 and 400 metres away from your house? The inference appearing to be that if there was one less than 200 metres away you might have trouble getting insurance - which would knock out most of Manor Green Road. Not a problem for us up the hill though. After a bit Mr Tesco went away for a think and came back with six quotes, five at under half what Halifax were offering and one a lot more. The catch was that the five were not exactly blue chip outfits, the names of which just tripped off the tongue. Never even heard of some of them.

Nevertheless, the signs are that Halifax are overcooking things. Off to the shop to see what they have to say. 'Oh no sir. We can't handle that sort of thing here. You have to phone the insurance people using that phone over there'. Which I do and have the pleasure of going through the security question rigmarole twice because the first person I talk to is not able to pass the baton to the second person I talk to. But who is able to knock off about two thirds of the proposed increase. Much muttering about how the Halifax policy is much cleaner and simpler than these other offerings are likely to be.

Which may well be true, so I suppose I am going to have to sit down with the small print. Wouldn't it be nice if I could just trust them?

Then a few days ago we had had a good experience with filling in our income tax form online. Good in the sense that the site had been well put together and one could do the thing in bits as the mood took one. The system remembered what you had done. And, to cap it all, the result seemed to be acceptable to the tax people and they sent us a nice letter a few days later.

So today we took a chance and opened a further communication from the tax people. Which turns out to be a four page letter, numbered page 1 to page 4, but which also appears to be two versions of the same two page letter, each purporting to give the BH a tax code. The two versions of the same two page letter are nearly identical, with their very own dear sir and yours sincerely bits, but the two tax codes are different. After much scratching of heads (and possibly other parts) we think we have worked out what is going on. But the thing is not a masterpiece of clarity. We are supposed to be educated, numerate people, well able to navigate the odd form, but what on earth would a bog-standard have made of it?

After careful consideration, we have decided that no further tax action is needed at the present time.