Goodness knows how I did it, but I seem to have organised my life so that it runs out annually and needs renewing before the first of April. I do grasp the significance of the end of the financial year and all that. But what I cannot work out is how I managed to co-ordinate the rest of my affairs to this heinous deadline as well.
Quite as if by magic, every insurance policy, yearly permit, pass or subscription I possess runs out about now. I’m never sure how this is possible because I cannot have done everything for the first time at the end of March — by which I mean buy a car, park a car, buy a horse, buy another horse, start my water supply, take out a 0 per cent credit card, get a ten-year passport, join Catholicmatch.com (for a laugh, OK?).
And yet I seem to have done precisely that, creating a period of unparalleled financial and administrative hell when my bank statement becomes so fraught with transactions it makes no more sense to me than the accounts of a multinational corporation. Little wonder I let all the envelopes marked ‘Urgent Renewal Documents Enclosed!’ pile up on the fridge like a mountain of papery doom until the last possible moment, expecting nothing but merciless exploitation from all concerned when I do start ringing the dreaded call centres.
But this year, when the day of reckoning came, something utterly bizarre happened. I made the first call to Aviva to renew my home-contents cover and it wasn’t any more expensive than last year, and a few days later some M&S vouchers arrived to thank me for my custom. So I rang them back for car insurance and within minutes they had offered me a deal that was less than half the price my current provider was quoting.
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