On the road

After three years of driving in India, it's time to get back to the comparative sanity of English roads. I signed up for a Vauxhall Zafira this morning and will collect it next week. In the meantime, I have been searching for car insurance. Having been out of the UK for seven years, I've lost any No Claims Bonus that I had - and I had the maximum - and so it's back to scratch for me.

I went to Go Compare to search for insurance and was staggered at the different trades and professions that appear on the drop-down list for "business type". Here's a selection:

Animal breeding
Baby Food Manufacturer
Blast Cleaning
Candle Dealer
Childrens [sic] Panel
Clock & Watch Manufacturer
Contact Lens Manufacturer
Egg Merchants

and so on...

Which is all well and good if the list is extensive and comprehensive; but it isn't. I couldn't find "surveyor" or "chartered surveyor" for instance, and I would have thought that there are probably more people employed in that industry than there are "Roller shutter manufacturers". Similarly, "civil engineering" is noticeable by its absence, whilst "Ice Merchant" is noticeable by its presence. At one stage, frustrated by my inability to find anything close to the new line of work that I'll be taking up in a week or so's time, I selected "calibration manager" as my occupation and "falconry" as the business type. I got a damn good quote for motor insurance too, which presumably means that calibrating birds of prey is seen as a soft risk - unless you happen to be a water vole of course.

But I do wonder what the call centre staff in India think that the people in Britain do for a living. "A nation of shopkeepers?" they must be thinking, "more like a nation of bee-keepers". They must be quite surprised when UK claimants are re-routed through to Bangalore and are revealed not as "sand blasters" or "pipe cleaners" or working in the "log and firewood" industry, but rather dull secretaries employed by county councils, and pen-pushers working not for G M Smeggins and Co (Cordwainers) Ltd, but rather G M Smeggins and Co (Chartered Accountants).


The image of Turkmenistan falconers at the Reading Birds of Prey festival comes from Ab's blog.