Underwritten Weekly

My new bed arrived on Tuesday. I’d paid for it back in October, with my first paycheque, and the only thing left to do was tell them what colour I wanted – a decision I failed to make for the better part of a year. The money was gone. The bed sat in a warehouse, theirs to release the moment I committed to a shade of beige.

So, for want of a colour, I carried on sleeping on the old one. Which had, for a good few months by then, been held up at one corner by tins of baked beans. I’m not being folksy about this. The frame gave out, I had tins, the tins were the right height, and physics took care of the rest. It worked so completely I’d stopped thinking about it.

Which, in hindsight, was reckless, because I’m allergic to baked beans. Properly allergic – the sort where a tin is less a food than a 999 call on speed-dial. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice I’d spent entire seasons sleeping on a small stack of the one thing in the house most likely to kill me. It held me up beautifully every night. It could also have done me in. I never looked at it, because it was working, and nobody looks at the things that are working.

You’ll remember Buncefield, maybe. It was an oil depot on the edge of Hemel Hempstead, where I went to school. One Sunday just before Christmas in 2005 it went up in what was the largest peacetime explosion in Europe since the war. I’d long since left the town, but it’s an odd feeling, seeing somewhere you know that well on the national news for the worst possible reason.

What happened was almost stupidly small for the size of the result. It was BP’s home town, and they were filling a petrol tank overnight. There was a gauge to watch the level, and there was a backup switch meant to shut the whole thing off automatically if the tank ever overfilled. The gauge had been sticking for months. And the backup switch wasn’t armed, because it needed a fitting that nobody had ever fitted, and so the tank just kept filling. Hundreds of tonnes of petrol went over the top into the cold night air, spread out into a low flat cloud across the site, and at one minute past six in the morning it found a spark and let go. It came in at 2.4 on the Richter scale. People heard it in the Netherlands. It burned for the best part of a week, and my 13 year old former self would have been delighted because P.E. would have been off the table for months as it took out the school sports hall. Between you and me: my “I forgot my P.E. kit” excuse ran perilously thin at times.

The remarkable thing is that it killed nobody, only because it was six on a Sunday and the estate around the depot was deserted.

The damage though was vast – three thousand-odd claims, homes, an entire industrial estate flattened, the whole thing landing somewhere around £1.4 billion in today’s money. And the businesses on that estate, the ones that lost everything in about four seconds – the machine shops, the hauliers, the little firms with six staff and a photocopier – didn’t fold. They carried on. They made payroll the following month out of money that by any sane logic shouldn’t have existed, given the building that earned it was now a hole in the ground.

The money arrived because they were insured. Insurance is the thing everyone resents paying for and nobody thinks about again. But go and stand on that estate the Monday after. Every one of those businesses is somebody’s whole life – the thing they built, the thing they borrowed against, the wages that pay for somebody’s mortgage, somebody’s kids, somebody’s Friday night. And in one still, freezing dawn, all of it is on fire. That is the moment a person finds out whether they are ruined or not.

They were not ruined. That is the entire point of our market.

The specific thing that saved them, business interruption cover, which is about the dullest phrase our market owns and one of the kindest things it does. It doesn’t just rebuild the wall. It keeps paying the wages while the wall is being rebuilt – so the welder and the driver and the woman who’s done the books for eleven years still get paid on the last Friday of the month, as if the world hadn’t ended, because for them we had decided it wouldn’t. It is the whole distance between “we lost the building” and “we lost the company.” Between a bad year and a closed one. Between a town that grieves and a town that recovers.

Somebody sat down years before any of this – some underwriter at a desk, on an ordinary afternoon, with a coffee going cold – and priced a Sunday morning nobody could bear to picture. Took the premium. Wrote the promise. Filed it. Forgot it. And then, when the unimaginable actually came, the promise was simply there – waiting, funded, and kept. Nobody needed to be talked into it. It had already been decided, quietly, by strangers, long ago.

That’s the job, on a good day. On the worst morning of a lot of people’s lives, we are the reason it is not also the last morning of their livelihoods.

Have a good week.

Rob

P.S. The beans have been moved to a cupboard, where they can do no structural or respiratory harm. I am considering declaring them on my contents policy as a named peril.