Talk of accidents and responsibility reminds me of a very quaint incident a good many years ago.

My wife and I had bought a nice little bungalow on the very edge of a small relatively new estate. The rear garden butted up to fields that stretched up eventually onto Ilkley moors. The bungalow was one of the last to be built on the estate and we were only the second owners, the previous ownere having been there for only about six or seven years. Next door lived a couple who had a very attractive daughter in her late teens.

At the time central heating was the exception rather than the rule and so I decided, in the interests of cost and customer satisfaction, that I would do my own installation of a Baxi boiler and attendant trimmings. I wondered whether to go over the top or underneath with the pipe work and after finding the bottom of the matwell at the rear door was removable, presumably intentionally (it all looked purpose made) I decided to go beneath.

There was very little head room (in fact it was so low that I would have do it all in a horizontal position, including navigating to and from the “pop hole”) and so quincyquontly the pipe work would have to be partially assembled at ground level and then joined together below, using compression fittings.

We had moved in during the summer and as usual there was the messing about with decorating here and there, and the attack on the heating system was left for quite a few weeks. When I finally got the necessary hardware delivered it was early autumn and upon opening up the doorway to the nether world I could see small pools of water and mud. The evenings and weekends of following couple of weeks were spent like a pig wallowing in shallow mud. However it all got completed, fired up and it ran trouble free until we moved on a few years later.

I was talking to a neighbour across the road one day and telling him of the water problem. He apparently was living there when all the bungalows on our side of the road were being built. The ground behind us sloped upwards to the field, and our back garden was reached by going up three steps. The neighbour across the road was quite a bit lower than us and so gravity was a factor in this matter. It turned out they the builder had simply JCBed the land horizontal where he wanted to build the bungalows, and in so doing had gone straight through the land drains and done nothing to redirect the land water. Such was the problem that a couple of bungalows further along the road often appeared to be incontinent. Building inspectors.....who knows.?????

So slowly as we got to know the neighbours we found the next door neighbours with the daughter were very nice people, contrary to the old couple the other side of us. The young girl had a boy friend who was interested in motor cars and when he found I was “into” BMC Minis he was a frequent visitor.

One summers evening when the parents were away on holiday, he appeared looking a little bit fed up and I asked what was matter. He said he wondered if I had any floorboarding and some nails, and a hammer and a saw and etc. etc. So I enquired what he was proposing to do, I could see no commection with BMC Minis.

It turned out that he and the young girl had been earnestly practicing contraception on her bed when the were suddenly give extra impetus by the sudden collapse of the rotten floor boards beneath them.

I supplied him with what I could and he did effect some sort of repair, because the matter was never raised again by anyone, other than a knowing wink from the daughter a couple of days after the parents returned.

Insurance ….what could the claim form look like? 
 

Edited by - catgate on 20/11/2010 9:08:52 PM


Every silver lining has a cloud.