Writer, Sue Limb is back - and in darkly humorous mood...
When I was a little girl, there was a rhyme - I think it was originally Cornish - which used the make my hair stand on end with fright. It went something like this: "From ghoulies, and ghosties, and long-leggety beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us." I developed a fear of Things That Go Bump in The Night which has lasted till this day. But it was only gradually that I realised there was a therapy. Insurance.
In 1966 I was a student travelling in the USA, waiting for a flight to take me from Philadelphia to Dayton Ohio. I noticed a desk in the departure lounge selling insurance, and decided to find out what this very grown-up and rather dull-sounding word meant. I discovered to my delight that I could buy a policy for a few dollars which would, in the event of my being killed in an air crash, reward my grieving parents, indeed make them wildly, almost indecently rich.
Now my character is an attractive mixture of cowardice, guilt and pessimism, so you can imagine how eagerly I signed up. And a couple of hours later, when the plane flew into one of those midwest electrical storms, I was comforted by the thought of the lovely conservatory and holidays in the Algarve my parents would be able to afford. Somehow we did get back down out of the sky again, and of course I was so relieved to have survived that the few dollars I'd spent on the premium seemed totally insignificant.
That's the other character trait which makes insurance so appealing: cowardice, guilt, pessimism and recklessness with money. When I'm feeling low I trudge off to the High Street and try on several different policies until I find one that suits me. It's a real shot in the arm - almost literally. Insurance is like inoculation. In return for a brief, small pinprick of pain you get protection, big time. You hope.
When I first discovered the world of insurance it was like arriving at a party. All the companies seemed so welcoming and they had such cuddly names. The Amicable. The Friendly. The Union. The Alliance. Sunshine seemed to figure a lot, too. Sun Alliance. It sounds like a Club Med holiday. Well, I don't suppose you'd do a great deal of business if you started an insurance company called The Dark Malicious.
Human life as we know it does tend to be a bit dark and malicious, though. The bloke who says "Cheer up, it may never happen!" is lying. We know we will, eventually, get ill and die, and we also suspect that our house may burn down, our car be stolen, and - as many of us have found to our cost - the river will burst its banks and come pouring in through the catflap.
For those of us saddled with cowardice and pessimism, though, dread isn't just a faint needling apprehension, it's an opportunity to go to town, and stitch a great big tapestry of terror. As a child I feared Things That Went Bump in the Night. Now I'm a Grown up, Things Go Bump in the Day.
Flying is of course a recurring nightmare. I'm so deeply attached to Mother Earth that I sometimes get a bit homesick if I'm upstairs for more than half an hour. But, on the other hand, one doesn't want to be too closely confined, either. Mother Earth is a great comforter but I don't want her actually to be sitting on top of me, yet. So Eurostar is a terrible ordeal. Twenty minutes of sheer torture. It's not just the earth, it's the sea above that. Water's one of the worst threats to human survival, as any teenage boy will agree.
It wasn't until I'd been shelling out on policies for years and years that the worst dread of all set in, though. The dread that the insurance companies wouldn't pay up. That they'd have stashed away in the small print a little loophole through which they would wriggle out of their obligations and skip away scot-free, saying "So sorry the roof of your house blew off! But it does say in the exclusions that if this happened on a Saturday when the wind was in the west and the Queen was wearing red, it wouldn't count. So sorry! Better luck next time!"
What I want to know now is, can you insure yourself against your insurance company not paying up? I'm afraid I might just have to face up to it: there are no policies equal to my dreads, and no ways round the ingenuity of fate. I have insured myself against air, earth, fire and water, but I dread death by polystyrene.
