Well there is a paradoxical statement if ever I heard one!

Many years ago I worked with a `scouser`. He looked like Robbie Coltrane! He also had a quip for every occasion. One of his favourite sayings was “when you think everything is going right, everything is usually going wrong”. He made me laugh, but as I grew older, that saying came back to haunt me more than a few times. Few of us consider home emergency insurance until after the event.

We had lived in our home from new and it was now about 10 years old. Not very old for a house you might say, but some of the fittings were showing signs of ageing. Thereby lays the path to problems, `out of sight, out of mind` as another saying goes. We all see that walls need repainting, doors replacing and carpets re-laid.

Unfortunately, the one thing we did not see was the deteriorating central heating boiler until it was too late. The irony is that these things invariably happen only when you use the boiler, but when do you use it? That’s right, when it gets cold. So there we were, at the weekend with no heating. Temperatures had fallen suddenly to freezing overnight and we had neither heating nor any hot water. Have you ever tried to get hold of a heating engineer at weekends? And when you do, at what cost? You can also forget about the mates who will always help out, except when you actually ask them!

We had to shiver for nearly 48 hours before we could get anyone out to it and then we faced a huge bill.

It seems common sense to insure our cars, house and mobile phones, yet we leave ourselves vulnerable to the obvious just because we are not aware of any problems until they happen. Home emergency insurance covers the things that go wrong even when we think everything is going right.