Further update

So the recovery firm told us that the car was not obviously damaged and we started the process of trying to buy it back. We liked the car and it was exactly what we wanted and we had spent a lot of time researching different cars to find it. However the insurance company had sold the car to a salvage company. After many attempts, we got the phone number of the salvage company and phoned them as we were hoping to go and have a look at the car. They told us the car was badly damaged on one side so we gave up and yesterday bought the car we had put the deposit on. No idea who was telling the truth. The man from the insurance company was going to inspect the car and tell us a buy-back price last Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Friday, then next Monday. We have had to give back the courtesy car so we no longer had a vehicle to use to go and inspect our old car. And we need a vehicle to use next Tuesday for something we are doing. So we gave up and bought the other car. It is similar to our old one but older and more expensive and definitely more than the insurance company gave us for our old one.

I have left out the daily hassles of phone calls and/or letters with the insurance company, the sleepless nights, the evenings when I was too fraught to eat my dinner etc etc. Remind me why we have insurance please!

Update

My husband is a lot better but not completely out of the woods yet. We found a new (to us) car just slightly older than but very similar to the one we lost. We are beetling around in the Corsa courtesy car but it is very difficult to do all the shopping for the coffee shop in it. But hey, it goes. And we are very grateful for it too. Imagine doing all that shopping on the bus! No - don't. It is too awful to contemplate!

So yesterday the postman rang the doorbell with a letter that we had to sign for. It was from a company that the police had authorised to collect our stolen car from where it had been abandoned nine days earlier. But nobody had told us. The insurance company had advised us that we probably would not see our car again and to start looking for a new one asap because we had the courtesy car for a very limited time. Still, we contacted that car collection company and the insurance company and went to receive the contents of the car that were still there. My husband's glasses were still there so that saves us about £600 as we would have had to replace them. The tools and most other things were gone. They did not take our pair of insulated mugs or the two Werthers sweets in a bag : )

Not sure what is happening now about whether we get our old car back or buy the other one. Both options will cost us quite a few hundred pounds. Need to hear from the insurance company again.

Ah well.

What a week!

What a week - and we are only on Thursday. On Monday I was down at church baking as usual. In the afternoon we had to go to the funeral of an old friend so my husband came down on the bus at lunchtime to help me clear up so that we could go off to the funeral which was about 10 miles away. He washed up everything that was ready to be washed and popped to the office to do a job until I was finished with the rest of the utensils. His coat was sitting on my chair in the corner of the kitchen. I popped out to the Ladies at one point - the only time I was out of the kitchen. So we finished up and packed my bags up and went out to get in the car to go home and change for the funeral. And the car was gone. Stolen. Somebody had nipped into the kitchen when I was out of it for two minutes at the Ladies and felt in the zipped up pockets of my husband's coat and found the car keys.... I did not know he had left them there or I would have moved them. We had only bought the car in May (2012 model so not exactly new) and have since paid for a tow bar to be fitted and for a specific-to-that-car roof rack. My husband's spare glasses are in the car (£500 for a new pair because he has so many eye problems) and lots of tools and all sorts of stuff that is convenient for us to have at hand in the car. The insurance company will pay a maximum of £250 for contents. Grrr.

We have cctv footage of the man and woman who stole the car, three eyewitnesses who can describe them. They are known "customers" at the coffee shop, always asking for a free cup of tea. The coffee shop staff noted them particularly this visit because they asked for a free cup of tea because they could not afford to pay and then asked for the code for the security barrier at the end of the carpark. they wondered how they could afford to run a vehicle when they could not afford the tea.

And with all that evidence, the police don't seem very interested at all. I didn't know that you can only report a theft of or from a car or from a house online now. It took a good couple of hours to do that. Then another hour with the insurance company trying to talk on the phone with a Chinese (or thereabouts) lady whose first language was definitely NOT English. What a performance! The insurance company are just assuming that our car will never be seen again. So we went frantic yesterday going around car sales places to look at cars while we still have the courtesy car to get there.

And last night my husband went down with a tummy bug. 18 hours now and he is still running to the bathroom. I am sitting here waiting to see if he has passed the bug on or not...…..

And we never got to the funeral to say goodbye to our elderly friend.

What a week!

Grrrr!

The new car is doing very well. It drives nicely and I am getting used to the stop/start eco thingummyjig. BUT some nasty so and so has gone and scraped something along its whole length. Grrrr! Definitely not amused!

It is exam season and I am busy invigilating. This is needed to fill up a little bit of the gap left in the savings by the car, a two bar and roof rack bars, two crowns, one pair of specs for my husband and another pair of specs in the offing for me. My pay for invigilation will be a drop in the ocean, but every little helps : )