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Tag: cheltenham
Someone, somewhere hates us
Early Friday morning (about 01:55) our car alarm went off.
I went down stairs and found that the windscreen had three holes in it. I deactivated the alarm and went and phoned the police and gave them all the details.
Got up in the morning and got a new windscreen booked for today.
Also booked a hire car because we were supposed to be going to Wigan for my parents Golden Wedding Anniversary.
Found that there is also a hole in the roof. The psychopath who smashed the windscreen also rammed a screwdriver or similar pointed object through the roof.
So I phoned the police and updated and did sort of say that as I’d phoned 999 in the middle of the night (which is what the police had told me to do) I was a bit surprised that no-one had been to see me yet.
Police came round and talked to the neighbours and one of them heard our alarm go off, heard a car door slam and saw a white car leaving the estate at speed.
So the scum who are targetting our car aren’t even locals.
Police want to know if we’ve upset someone. We haven’t as far as we know but as the previous residents of this house are still telling places like Morrisons Supermarkets that they live here when they are stealing petrol from them it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve told someone they owe money to that they live here and we’re being picked on. So if you’ve got a grudge against a member of the Green Family who run pubs.. THEY DO NOT LIVE IN MY HOUSE AND THEY DO NOT DRIVE A SAAB 93.
Of course my insurance company are being total bastards. Tesco say that the two events although they are obviously linked are totally separate and so that is TWO claims. Each claim has a £300 excess on it and will wipe out 2 years of my no claims. Taken separately they probably wouldn’t count as enough to write off the vehicle but together they would.
So come February I’m moving away from Tesco car insurance because they’ve frankly taken the piss with my car insurance once too often.
Oh No. Not again!
Those were the thoughts of the bowl of petunias in The HitchHikers Guide to Galaxy when it suddenly came into existance miles above Magrathea.
Oh No. Not Again was what my wife and I said when we came out of the house this morning to find that someone had vandalised the 93.
Not the windscreen this time. Much more damage than that. They’ve taken a screwdriver to it by the looks of things.
The whole passenger side is damaged. A big deep scratch following the line of the front wheel arch, several scratches on both doors and a large scratch and a deep gouge on the rear wing. They’ve even taken the screw driver to the passenger door window and scratched that deeply and its special heat reflecting glass. As the car is metallic silver its not something I can patch up so someone will be picking up a very large bill, and knowing my insurance company who seem to find any excuse they can for not paying out for anything (I’m sorry – the sun came up this morning so we can’t pay out) it will be me picking it up.
The police will be coming round this evening to look at it but have already admitted that “There is nothing they can do to stop this happening again”. Well there is – they could actually start treating the scrotes round here as criminals rather than giving them a little slap on the wrists and saying “Don’t do that again”
A good time was had by all
Despite the weather (which actually was remarkably good) we had an excellent time at the 3rd Annual Cheltenham Beer Festival which was raising money for the Cheltenham Branch of The Samaritans.
Last years event raised £6000 which is pretty impressive and helps keep The Samaritans running providing a service that really does help save peoples lives.
Jon, Neil, Nick and I walked from Prestbury/Oakley and we got there just about at Noon.
I had a good chat with Sara (who I knew from my days in Parasoc) who does work for the Samaritans and she recommended a couple of beers that she said were well worth trying.
We grabbed a small gazebo and some chairs and headed to the bar. The range was pretty impressive and I even tried the Battledown Brewery’s “4 Kings” – which has an ABV of a mere 7.1%. Oddly enough even though it smelt very much like a barley wine it was remarkably thin.
The food was, as ever, good: good solid beef burgers, a pig roast and of course sausages in a bun (“Get em whilst their hot, inna bun with Onions!”)
Michael, Simon, Paul and Richard joined us a bit later – Richard had just flown back from Turkey that morning and was looking forward to drinking some proper beer.
We left mid evening – the beer was running out and we were all feeling a bit hungry. So we walked back into town, grabbed a pint at The Bell and then headed to Maheks for a curry. Maheks is usually very good but the service on Saturday night was extremely slow. The place wasn’t busy but it took nearly 2 hours for 7 of us to have starters and a main course (and even when the main course arrived it took over 5 minutes for them to get the last of our naan breads onto the table).
So we’re all looking forward to next summers event and they may even be planning one for the middle of winter!!
Life, and stuff
Well this weekend is the Friends of Cheltenham Samaritans beer festival. This is their third annual beer festival and if the other two were anything to go by then this too will be a great day out and with a very worthy cause. I’ve never needed the Samaritans myself because I’ve had people I’ve been able to talk to but its got close a couple of times.
So we will be there just after noon on Saturday and we will, what ever the weather throws at us, have a great time drinking good beer in good company.
I’ve still not uploaded any photos from Maine to my Flickr account. I guess I need to upgrade to pro as I’m still on the free account and I need to do some serious re-organisation and categorisation of my photos.
Kathy got a phone call on Monday night saying that Jen had been in a car accident. The news made the Kennebec Journal They flew her to Bangor as Augusta doesn’t have facilities to land a helecopter. In the UK the Air ambulance doesn’t care about landing pads – they’ll use car parks and playing fields as temporary landing pads. She had exploratory surgery on Tuesday as she said she had pelvic pain and her pelvis is cracked in two places. She is in a lot a pain and we’re waiting to hear if they will be able to move her nearer to home as Bangor is quite a way from Waterville (where she lives) and Augusta where her grandmother lives.
Here are some photos of her car. We all think that two cracks in her pelvis is a very lucky escape. The maroon car is the car that hit hers.
So its been rather a stressful week for Kathy who has spent most of her evenings on the phone talking to people and keeping people up to date with what is going on.
Its that time of year again..
… when the roads are gridlocked, the pubs and restaurants are full to over flowing and you can’t actually enjoy living in town.
Yes that’s right – its The Cheltenham Festival. When the world and his dog descends on the town, drinks too much Guinness and then throws up or pisses in the street.
So just what is the impact of the festival on town? Well it took 90m minutes for me to do a round trip to Gloucester today (about 30 minutes longer than normal) and the roads are a complete mess. Its not worth going out for a drink because everywhere is full of drunks from the racecourse. And of course THEY are more important than the locals because they are so pissed and flash with the cash that they don’t notice if they are over charged, and don’t even think about trying to go and eat somewhere.
I don’t want to even think about the carbon foot print of the festival. 4 days, approx 60,000 people per day. Thats a lot of cars/buses/coaches. Then there’s the shipping (and storage and preparation) of all the beer and food they consume over the four days and nights at the racecourse and down in town, and the placing of over 3 miles of “no parking” cones because these people will park ANYWHERE – they don’t give a toss about anyone else, and the shipping in of all the horses, the jockeys and the racing teams.
Then what about the litter, the mess that the council have to clear up (and I wonder who picks up the bill for that), and the policing? Tons of drunk drivers around and tons of people drunk and disorderly but no-one seems to get stopped/charged/fined.
But its “good for the town” apparently… not sure how
Cheltenham – not a nice place to live
Got up this morning and found the 93 has been vandalised again
So in the past 8 months:
93 – smashed windscreen
93 – dents in the roof from some scrote running over it
95 – smashed windscreen
93 – smashed windscreen (and this time they left the rock behind in my front garden)
Cars parked on the road, only third party, no windscreen cover (thanks a bunch Tesco for lying to me)
£400-500 per windscreen.
So that £1500 paid out in the past 8 months to repair damage that the police show little interest in.
I report it- they want to know if I’m White English. I ask them is it going to make a difference to how they investigate it?
I think I manage to persuade them that as no other vehicle has been damaged its targetted against me or my cars or my wife.
Don’t expect the police to do anything – they’ve no teeth any more and the scum who do this sort of thing aren’t afraid of them.
Can’t afford to repair the cars so will have to get rid of them and buy something cheap and nasty that I can do fully comp insurance on and if that car gets worked over then I’m going to be raising hell
Kerboom???
There are some very interesting markings on the road outside our house.
Two nice long skid marks which start in the middle of the road, drift slowly over to one side and end at the back end of another vehicle which is a bit mashed.
Now our road is quite narrow, its wide enough for one vehicle to get down the middle with a car parked on both sides. The road goes nowhere and is posted at 30mph.
The skid marks are, at a quick visual estimate (based on the length of our canal boat), about 70 feet long. How fast does a car have to be going to leave 70 foot long skid marks on a road?
No doubt it was some piece of chavvy scum from Whaddon in a stolen car… it won’t be the first time that some moron has crashed on our road (someone clipped 3 cars once and then flipped the vehicle they were in).
I really do despair about Cheltenham sometimes…
Differing levels of Vandalism
A week after I phoned to police to tell them that our 95 had been vandalised I get a letter through the post from Gloucesteshire Police.
Its depressing reading – says so much about what our police force has become:
————
Offence : Criminal Damage to property valued under £5000 – vehicle
Date Reported : 03/12/2007
..
..
..
The offence you reported has been recorded within our computerised crime reporting system…..
To date our investigations have failed to identify the offender. Nevertheless we shall continue to review the matter.
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So its been logged on their computer – wonderful. Did it really take them a week to do that? Actually No. It took them 2 days to log in into the computer (or print the letter) as the letter is dated 05/12. Then they posted it – two days AFTER they had printed it, and it arrived on the 10th (they did at least not waste money sending it out first class!)
So how do we interpret “Criminal Damage to Property valued under £5000”. Does it mean the property is worth less than £5000, does it mean that they did less than £5000 worth of damage?
Its sodding vandalism – my personal property has been vandalised. But apparently the severity of the crime is linked to some odd concept of commercial value. Would it be more of a crime if my car was a £350,000 Ascari and they’d smashed the windscreen, or it would it be more of a crime if they’d mashed the mirrors and slashed the tyres on the 93 at the same time.
Its my car – its how I get to work, its how I go shopping. But to the police it is simply an item of monetary worth.
As for the “we have failed to identify the offender” well, to use an american phrase: no shit sherlock. It happened on a quietish side road, where we hardly ever see policemen. The scrotes from Whaddon roam round the neighbourhood causing trouble all over the place. The police do nothing and then the sodding council gives Whaddon a million pound community centre which I’m sure they’ll torch to the ground soon.
Still the police have more important things to do than chase criminals – its learning Polish All this from the police force whose Chief Constable – Dr Brain (just got to love that name!!) says will have to cut services as they are short of money in next years budget
Oh well
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Now playing: Bif Naked – Nothing Else Matters
via FoxyTunes
Why Do People…
vandalise other peoples property?
Heading out today after the frost had cleared I noticed that the windscreen on my Saab 95 Estate has been smashed. It was OK when I parked it at 6:20 on Friday evening but I didn’t use it over the weekend and the weather was so bad I didn’t notice it as I was dashing in and out to my other car over the weekend.
Some low-life has wacked the windscreen right in the middle of the drivers side – windscreen is broken beyond repair so I’ve got to get it replaced.
This is the second time that I’ve had a window smashed in recent months. The previous time it was my other Saab (a 93) which was wacked on the passenger side.
The cars are usually parked on opposite side of the road and in both cases the vandalism has been on the road side of the vehicle – so I guess they just drive (or cycle) down the road and smash windscreens as they go.
The police have been informed but what can they do – the yobs in Cheltenham seem free to roam around doing what they like and the police seem incapable of stopping them.
So that’s another expense I didn’t really want – especially coming up to Christmas.
So thanks a bunch who ever did this. Serves me right for living near the cess pit that is Whaddon I guess