How long does it take to fully settle a car insurance claim where you were the totally innocent party?

1 month?

2 months?

4 months?

6 months?

No. My claim still isn’t settled a full six months after the accident. Here is a quick timeline:

August: Canadian crashes into my car, I get given a hire car, my car written off, cheque from insurance company arrives, I start shopping for a new car

September: Begin uninsured loss recovery process so that I can keep my three years no claims bonus and get my policy excess back, also buy new car

October: Third party (TP) insurance company claims that I crashed into the back of their vehicle. This is odd since the damage was to the rear of my car.

November: TP insurance company finally admits liability but dispute that there was any damage to my vehicle (note: my vehicle written off).

December: TP insurance company want to see my written off car to assess damage. Note that by now it has been scrapped by my insurance company.

January: TP insurance company demand to see the assessors report of damage to vehicle. Finally accept that they are not going to be able to see the vehicle.

February: My insurance company being really really slow.

I am going to have to start chasing this up every day. £150 isn’t a huge amount of money and at this rate I will have spent that in phone calls and time to sort it all out. However it is the principle of it all that bothers me. It really shouldn’t take over six months to sort a rear end shunt out. Secondly I don’t really want to lose my 3 years no claims bonus as that really will cost me a lot of money when I come to renew my insurance.

I am moving flat again in less than three days now. I feel completely unprepared for this, however packing is going well. I have signed up for Cable (4meg broadband, free tv including skyone, phone) for £28 a month which I thought was rather a good deal. Thank you Stewart at Telewest for sorting that out for me.

I have invited Becky and Dave round on Friday evening to eat what is left in my fridge and freezer. I have also just heard that Nick and his girlfriend Tiffany are in the country and will be in Bristol from Friday too! It will be good to see Nick again, not seen him for ages. Greg and his new girlfriend Phoebe are going to be around at the weekend too which should be fun. Rosie and James are having a joint Birthday party on the Saturday evening so there should be lots of people around to help me move.

A new flat calls for a flat warming which I will be having on Saturday 3rd March. I’ll send invites out and stuff when I have moved. I am wondering if I need a party theme or not.

I am also trying to get cheap tickets to see the Guillemots at Bristol Acadamy on Sunday night. Ebay is proving frustrating. Please don’t bid on stuff I want.

I am reading a book by Ben Elton called The First Casualty at the moment. It is pretty good and fairly easy to read. However it isn’t really that taxing on the brain. Standard Elton stuff really.

Oh, and I have signed up to Facebook.com

and Claim ID: http://www.claimid.com/dunos

Bit of a random blog post today.

After a year in my current flat I have decided that I need to save a bit of money and therefore decided that I needed to move to a slightly less expensive flat. I am staying in Bristol for the moment, I like the vibrancy of the city, and will continue to commute to Chippenham for work.

After several weeks of fruitless searching I finally found a flat only a few minutes away from my current home. It is a first floor two bedroom flat, one double and one large single, with a kitchen, bathroom and large lounge. It is a bit bigger than my current place but less expensive per month and has gas central heating which will also cost less. The decoration isn’t as nice but once I have my own furniture in it should be ok. I will have to buy myself a freezer and washing machine as the new flat doesn’t have these. What it does have is use of a shared garden, perfect for summer BBQs, and amazing views over Bristol from the two bedrooms.

My moving date is hopefully going to be the 10th February. Then I guess I will have to organise some sort of housewarming!

After many months of misfortune with my 12″ Powerbook Apple finally agreed that it was time for a replacement. On Wednesday I took delivery of a brand new 15″ MacBook Pro!

BBC News is reporting this morning that the smoking ban in England will come into force on the 1st July 2007.

About time too.

They sky was really dramaticly coloured this morning. I managed to take these quick snaps before jumping in the car to go to work.

Woah, what a day it was on Tuesday. I went to London (hence the title of this post) to meet with a new media development and design agency called Outside Line. They do some pretty intresting things on websites for major music artists as well as other corporate media websites.

After that was all over I met up with Jamie and Gabriele who happened to be having a day off work. Sometimes coincidences like that are worth wile. We grabbed a subway and then headed down to Victoria to see if there were any tickets left for the musical Wicked. Jamie managed to get us some seats and then we had a few hours to kill before the show started.

We headed over to Harrods and got a Krispy Kreme donut from the food court before wanding around in the electrical and toy departments.

Jamie and Gabs left some funny pictures on the computers and mobiles that were on display.

We got back to the theatre at 6.30 and headed off to find our seats.

The theatre was fairly empty when we got inside but by the time the show started it was full. The show was really good. It tells the story of the Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the good witch of the north (Glinda) and the wicked witch of the west (Elphaba).

I got the late train back from Paddington, arriving back in Bristol at 1.30am.

Over the weekend I followed the North Bristol Artists trail with Dave, Becky and Rosie. The idea of the trail was that members of North Bristol Artists would open up their houses for the weekend and let the general public in to view the work of talented locals. This included paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography, jewlery and many other items.

Becky and Rosie’s mum was exhibiting watercolours at one of the houses. Apparently she was rather chuffed that she had managed to sell a number of pieces. Becky bought a print of a jar of marmite and Rosie bought a small oil painting of a sea at night.

One of the intresting things was nosing around peoples houses. The houses were generally very large with huge bay windows. Some had spectacular views over Bristol with one in St Andrews having a view stretching as far as the Seven bridge.

Finally got my Apple Powerbook back from the repair centre a few weeks ago after several months of repairs. It still have a few issues with it but I had decided to ignore them . They were:

• Two dead pixels on the new screen
• Lid latch still not keeping the lid closed properly
• Laptop no longer sat level on a level surface, it would wobble as you type
• Two inch long scratch on the plastic surrounding the screen

However this weekend I discovered a far more annoying issue with the thing. Basically if you try and plug it into a network using a network cable it wouldn’t stay connected to the network. It would keep losing connectivity unless you wiggled the plug around. I tried different cables, different networks, everything.

So I rang up Apple this week and they have agreed to give me a brand new laptop. Not only are they replacing it, they are upgrading me to their MacBook Pro line of laptops with a 15″ screen, double the hard disk space, double the memory and a faster processor.

The technician asked me if going from a 12″ screen to a 15″ screen would be a problem. Not at all Mr man from Apple, not at all!

My old laptop is being collected later today. Hopefully sometime in the next two weeks I should receive my new one!

You may have already read about my car accident a few months ago. The latest development is that my Uninsured Loss Recovery Company have written to me to tell me that the third party insurance company is now admitting liability for the accident! YES!

This was after I had to draw a diagram of the accident.

However they are disputing the fact that my vehicle had to be written off because the third party driver made a statement to say that they couldn’t see any damage to either car.

This isn’t suprising as I couldn’t see any damage at the time either - it was only after when I got the car home that I realised that, after having opened the boot, I couldn’t shut the boot.

So it is just possible that I might stand a chance of getting my £150 excess back and also retaining my three year no claims bonus.

In reality the no claims bonus is more important as it will make next years insurance renewal less painful. However the £150 will pay for getting an ipod adaptor fitted which would be nice. I miss listening to the ipod in the car.