Who let the dog (insurance) out?

It’s April 2021. The nation is on the cusp of freedom having been locked away indoors for a year – forced to bake banana bread, watch every show on Netflix and sing Happy Birthday on repeat while washing their hands.

The old and vulnerable have been granted access to leave their bubbles and receive the ‘Vaccine’, while the remainder of the population wait in hope, masks in hand, that they too will be summoned to the clinic.

This isn’t the latest pitch for Black Mirror or an excerpt from some disturbed, dystopian novel. It is in fact (drumroll please)… reality.

It’s also a rather dramatic introduction to a blog post which is actually about pet insurance – one of the many life admin tasks that has crept up on me during lockdown.

Just when you thought that life in these strange times couldn’t get any weirder, there’s always life admin to remind you that adulthood is not the party you thought it would be when you were growing up.

Shoulder shuddering tasks like insurance are inconvenient for any self-respecting adult who wants to spend their Saturday playing Beach Buggy Races or designing Pinterest boards for items they can’t afford because they spent it all on insurance.

Now that I’m a grown-up (ish), I have adopted an adulty way of carrying out the mundane duty of dog insurance:

1.) Switch on laptop (grumble loudly)
2.) Trawl through Go Compare (shake head several times unnecessarily)
3.) Call current insurer and ask why price has increased (haggle shamelessly)
4.) Put phone down, sigh and continue with current plan (which you were always going to do anyway)
5.) Repeat again next year (in a sorry case of Dog-Ja-Vu)

Of course, in the fun and games of being an adult, it’s easy to forget that having a pet is a privilege (especially when your dog shoves his head in a fellow dog walker’s pocket and steals all the chicken).

But, for the hassle it takes, pets do pay us back in wonderful ways – like my dog, for example, who came second place in the best rescue category in the local Pet Factor competition. We won’t dwell on the fact that he didn’t win first.

Now if you don’t mind me, I’ve got some very important errands to do (like playing Mario Kart on the DS).