Travel insurance

Mrs W had a bout of tonsillitis and pharyngitis on our recent holiday (she's a martyr to her throat), so we had to visit a local doctor. When you arrive at the surgery, you're supposed to put on slippers, but I have to admit that I missed this particular piece of Swissiquette. Perhaps it has something to do with germs? I've never been asked to wear slippers at a doctor's in London.

Anyway, the bill and the subsequent medications probably came to about £100. We thought we'd claim it back on our travel insurance on return.

You wouldn't believe the guff they expect you to send. Nightmare form to fill in. Loads of original documents, showing our shoe sizes etc. I felt compelled to send these special delivery, in case they got lost, which cost about £4. The excess is £50, I think, so we've already written off more than half the cost. Mrs W and I spent a couple of hours getting everything together.

All in all, you have to ask whether it's worth it. But we're not prepared to shrug our shoulders and say forget it. I'll keep you posted.

Comments

A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

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Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at ...

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