Tom Burke’s Blog

QE2 at her berth, 10 October

Today is QE2’s last call at Southampton, her home port. She leaves this evening on her last voyage ever, to Dubai where she will be converted into a hotel. There is a full programme of events, including a visit on board by the Duke of Edinburgh, a poppy drop to commemorate both the date (11 November) and (I presume) QE2’s own ‘war service’ – she went to the Falklands in 1982 – and a fireworks display this evening.

Mind you, she may be reluctant to leave Blighty. It seems that she managed to run aground on Bramble Bank on her way into Southampton. Practicing for this evening, perhaps? Anyway, here’s a link to a story about her last day in Southampton.

The picture is one I took at the end of our cruise on Ventura, and shows QE2 lying at her berth (at the QE2 Terminal) on the morning of 10 October.

Having finished our cruise on Ventura, I have had some of the perils of cruising brought home to me.

I knew I was sniffling a bit the last day of the cruise – all those exotic germs brought onboard by all the *other* passengers, of course – but as expected it turned into one of my ‘express’ colds that my wife gets upset about – day 1 is sniffles, day 2 is a nose like a dripping tap, day 3 is the coughing day, and day 4 is – well, by day 4, apart from sounding a bit hoarse, it’s over. (Why does she get upset about them? – because for her, a cold lasts a good two weeks and she feels so awful that several days have to be spent in bed.)

But the real problem became obvious on way home. The joint on my right big toe was hurting….. yes, it was the dreaded gout, which I’ve had once before. At first (Saturday) I thought it might not turn out to be too bad, but by Sunday it was hell. I swear I didn’t sleep a wink on Sunday night, nor Monday night – it was just impossible to find a way of lying (or sitting, or standing) that was not constantly, exceedingly painful. Ibuprofen and Co Codamol did no good, so on Monday & Tuesday it was ice packs and elevated feet, and on Wednesday morning I got a prescription for some industrial-strength NSAID tablets, which started to improve matters. I was able to sleep from Wednesday onwards and now (the following Monday) I’m feeling a lot better, although my foot is still swollen and I’m still not walking properly.

So what caused it? Well, a major cohort study in North America has suggested that red meat, beer, and whisky in particular can trigger an attack; and guess what I was eating and drinking on the cruise. Next time I shall eat fish! – or at least chicken.

One good thing – red wine, blamed often in the past for causing gout, seems not to be a culprit. Phew….

Well, everything suddenly came together late this week. The loss adjusters finally got the inspector’s report onto their system and authorised the replacement company to replace all our items, and most stuff duly arrived within 24 hours. We’re waiting for a few more items that weren’t available at immediate notice, but it should all be sorted out by the middle of the coming week. So we have been pretty fully idemnified.

A couple of observations are in order at this point, I think. First, if you’d asked me a month ago to put a value on the various items in my house I wouldn’t have said ‘£8000′; yet adding up the figures on the original receipts, that what it all came to. Secondly, we are wondering what we should do about protecting our property rather better than at present. I’m loath to go down the road of turning my house into Fort Knox, but lots of people have suggested that the fact that we didn’t have a burglar alarm at all on the house was a bit of an invitation – neighbours’ houses with alarms were not burgled that night. The alarm doesn’t even need to do much, just obviously be there. But am I indeed ‘inviting’ burglars by not having obvious protection on my house? Surely, locked doors and windows ought to be enough?

And we are of course hiding things more than we did. Most of the computers that were taken were laid out on a couple of desks in a ‘home office’, for our convenience. In the event this was also very convenient for the burglars, of course – thye just unplugged them and picked them up. In future the laptops will be turned off and put away out of sight. This will be less convenient for us, of course, so are we letting the burglars win? I don’t know, but it’s certainly the case that we have shifted our position towards security and away from convenience. Ah well – such is the world we live in.

Little to report on the burglary, unfortunately.

We reported it to our insurance company on Sunday 11 November, and they immediately appointed a company (“Ival”) to settle the claim. During the following days we had numerous conversations with Ival, produced a list of stolen & damaged items, copy receipts, etc, sent it all to them, and by the following Friday we seemed to be about to reach a settlement. Then suddenly the insurance company decided that they wanted to involve a firm of Loss Adjusters. I didn’t get to talk to them until the following week, of course; it took a few days for them to get details from the insurance company; and in the meantime they decided that Ival had better stop. So everything ground to a halt.

It was decided that a Loss Adjuster ought to come to my house and interview me, but the nearest appointment wasn’t until the 29th. When she came she was busy scribbling on pieces of paper, and told me that her laptop was broken. However at the end of the meeting she said she would recommend settling the claim, but that because her laptop was broken she would have to fax the paperwork to her company. I winced a bit at this thought.

I waited a few days as she suggested, then called her company. No, they had no knowledge of her report. No they didn’t know what was happening to it. A fax? Ah, well, they receive hundred, possibly thousands, of faxes every day; they get attended to in sequence, and the person I was talking to couldn’t say when mine would get transcribed onto their system… if it had been received at all… and she couldn’t check on that… actually, no-one could…. I just had to wait. Grr….

So I wait. It’s been three and a half weeks so far, and I still don’t actually, formally, know where I stand. And of course it’s approaching Christmas and everything will close down until after New Years. Grr….

Actually there was one area of progress. My wife’s jewellery was being dealt with by a different team within Ival, and no-one seems to have told them not to continue. So they appraised the jewellery and then sent us a charge card to be used at a particular jewellers to replace it. When I mentioned this to the loss adjuster who called, she seemed quite surprised; indeed, she didn’t seem to know anything about Ival’s involvement at all.

As I said at the top, the right hand knoweth not….

We were burgled on Saturday night, 10 November. After doing some strenuous work in the house for a couple of hours in the late afternoon we decided that we would eat out. We left the house at 7:15 and returned at 8:45, and as soon as we walked back in we knew something was wrong – the house was cold and there a strong draught down the stairs. We discovered that some person or persons had broken a first-floor (that’s second-floor for US readers) bedroom window that overlooks a flat roof at the back of the house, had then climbed in through it, and had made off with a lot – I mean a lot – of our stuff. They took a handful of laptop computers of various types & vintages; some of my wife’s jewellery; our iPods; all my photographic gear (all of it! – 2 35mm SLRs, 2 DSLRs, and about 1 dozen lenses); plus one or two other bits & bobs including a set of keys. The rest of the evening was spent talking to the police, and arranging immediate visits from glaziers & locksmiths to secure the house. Then we tried to sleep, not very successfully.

This last week has been mainly spent talking to our insurance company and/or their agents. In general the agents have been better that the insurance company itself. Unfortunately, having got to the point on Friday afternoon where it looked as if the agents were about to settle, the insurance company decided that they needed to refer the whole claim to a firm of loss adjusters. Talking to them today I get a strong feeling that they are going to take it back to square 1.

I feel increasingly angry about the whole thing. For the first few days the police kept calling me to make sure that everything was alright – was I happy with the contacts I had had with them? I almost felt like saying ‘yes, we must do this again’. Of course, the one thing that would have made me feel much happier would have been the information that they had caught the burglars and had recovered our property, but that hadn’t happened. And calls to the insurance company got increasingly unhelpful. It’s to a call centre in India; they only have a scan of the documents I sent to the address in the UK; and it’s a different person each time, who of course is not familiar with the claim. Frustration has been mounting.

Now I have to wait to see what line the loss adjusters take with everything, and how long that will take. Grr….

There would have been one funny moment in it all, however – I almost wish I had seen it. We had very recently bought a new flat screen TV (Panasonic 37″ Plasma, for afficianados), and the burglars had attempted to take this. First they tried to get it through a narrow horizontal window high up above the TV’s normal position, but the set was too big for that. Then we think they tried to get it out through the garage, but although they were able to get into the garage (from the kitchen) they couldn’t open the far door onto the drive – the junk we had created doing the strenuous job was piled in front of the garage door, blocking it. Finally they took the TV set upstairs to the bedroom where they had made their forced entry, but that window was also too small so at that point they gave up put it down. Sadly, in all that movement the set was slightly damaged.

I shall keep my readers informed of progress.