Anne Dickens | The Day After Yesterday

About eight months ago I decided that I needed to clean out the cellar in my Oxford cottage. It was full to the brim with random crap that I had dumped there after selling my London house.

So every time I had a spare hour or two, I would drag stuff out of there, and flog it on Fleabay.



Anyway, I was in the cellar two weeks ago when I stumbled across a laptop box. When I opened it, I discovered a laptop that I had destroyed whilst holidaying in America in 2009 (opens in a separate window).

My insurance policy had long since provided me with a replacement laptop, and I had just bunged the old one in the cellar to keep it out of the way. But after stumbling across it again, I decided to get rid of it by selling it as 'spares or repair' (non-functioning machine) on Ebay.

After one day, a potential buyer sent me an Ebay message: "please can you tell me if you there is any activity on the screen when you turn on the laptop?"

After killing the laptop in America, (I was fairly sure) I hadn't witnessed any screen activity at all, but I decided to double-check because it all happened so long ago. I plugged the laptop into the mains and turned it on (ooh baby, you are looking all sleek and shiny in that lovely laptop case).

And you will never bloody believe this ....... the laptop booted up perfectly .... right the way up to the Windows desktop. Then, after extensive testing, I established that everything was working as it should.

NO WAY! What's the likelihood of that?


It was like the Easter of laptops. My next discovery will probably be the 'shroud of Forest Hill'; a cardboard box with an outline of where my laptop lay whilst it was in the cellar.

Many people would probably say that any laptop that had endured that level of abuse, deserved to be put into an old laptop's home to decay gently.

But not me!  I decided to relist it on Fleabay as a working laptop in order to generate a few more spondulicks to pop into my pocket.

And ...... kerrrrrrching ............... the thing sold for £240. That'll keep in me Bolly for a couple of weeks dahlink.

A 28 year old mother-of-one bought it. She lived in Oxford and asked if she could collect the laptop from my house. I told her that she could, but as soon as she arrived, I realised quite quickly that she was a 'talker'. She had had a stroke two years ago, but her best friend (who was a vet), helped her greatly. Apparently it had taken the doctors 3 months to correctly diagnose her stroke, by which time it was mostly better, but now she was on blood-thinning medication for life. And her partner was not pulling his weight when it came to looking after the kid which was making things more difficult. If it wasn't for her mum she would be lost. But she was so thankful for having a new laptop because she found daytime boring ... not having a job and all. Her house needed jobs doing on it, so she was going to buy some paint and stuff online to try and save money. Not that her partner would appreciate that; he kept spending money on useless stuff even though she didn't have a job and they were short of money, and he took forever to do any DIY jobs. It was a good job that they got a good deal on the divan bed in the main bedroom or else they would still be sleeping on the old bed. And crikey, Maddy is such hard work now that she is approaching two. She's into everything and you can forget relaxation. Last week she was caught chewing on a lacy thong that she had retrieved from the washing basket. And if that wasn't enough, just last week Joel was saying that maybe they should try for another 'un, but no fear there, she had got some new contraceptive pills  ..... blah blah blah blah blah

I nearly offered to pay her £240 to leave. She was like a pull-string doll (with a very long string). But after gradually and subtley ushering her towards the front door, I finally managed to get her over the threshold.

"Nice to meet you!" I shouted at her whilst she was mid-sentence. And then I shut the front door without without waiting for a reply.

She continued talking to the closed front door for a couple of minutes, before realising that she had run out of people to talk at.

Crikey, I have never known anyone talk so much. If I had to give her a nickname, it would be 'White Noise'.

So dahlink, have you ever submitted an insurance claim? And if yes, what was it? (please type quietly because I am still suffering after my encounter with White Noise).