I accidentally in your base

http://www.partiallyclips.com/index.php?id=1498 amused me.

Life is going pretty damn well at the minute. In no particular order, lately I have:

* Flown (or indoor skydived, whichever name you prefer - I intend to go back a LOT once I get my settlement money).
* Fallen in love (rather suddenly and unexpectedly, and all the sweeter for it).
* Had a strangely affirming sort-of reprimand at work ("I need you to stop being apathetic; you're second in command of the whole company and I need your help." "Ah. Right.").
* Had lots of fantastic kinky sex. My girlfriend is made of win and yum.
* Had my annual check-up at the GUM clinic, all tests clear. Always nice.
* Failed to find a flat, despite looking at dozens of them. I'm not in a hurry particularly, but it would be nice to have somewhere of my own. Preferably somewhere of a reasonable size - I want to host some after-parties.
* Spent lots of time with my friends. They are lovely, lovely people, and I want to spend even more lots of time with them. Damn this working for a living nonsense, it interferes badly with what could otherwise be really monumentally spectacular social lives.
* Done quite a bit of spinning, mostly staff. Notably, four hours at Trance on the Thames - a free outdoor dance party on the Thames Beach (only appears at low tide, under Festival Pier on the south bank) - which was loads of fun.

Coming up there are more exciting things... at the end of this week, Helen and Kristen will be doing a live painting event at Planet Angel, which is cool. At the end of this month, they will be having their first exhibition, at The Foundry, which is even cooler. You should all come, to both but particularly to the exhibition - preferably to the opening night, on the 22nd :) [details]

I also have a certain amount of stress sources. Work is difficult to get a handle on at present, hence the previously referenced apathy. The new love, while sweet and wonderful, has not been the simplest of emotional entanglements, and continues to be tricky in places. My leg regularly hurts much more than usual for no apparant reason, and the promised settlement money hasn't even begun the process of turning up - the other side's insurance company are clearly going to wait until they're legally 100% obliged and compelled to hand over the cash (and quite possibly threatened with bailiffs) before they actually do so. Bastards.

Still, the good things (especially that new love, and my glorious girlfriend and friends) are outweighing the bad by a margin I couldn't begin to estimate. It's good being me.

Which is nice.

The other side have come back with an offer of £110,000. My solicitor is asking for my opinion, but she's suggesting we could counter-offer at £120k with an eye to eventually settling at £115k.

I'm starting to get quite a strong feeling of "quit while you're ahead", but she still seems very confident.

I've decided to ask her to make the £115k offer ourselves, instead of trying to haggle them into making it. I hate haggling, always have. If they're mentally aiming towards £115k then hopefully they'll accept the offer from us rather than trying to worm their way down, and if they aren't willing to go any higher (or they were, but decide to worm in the face of my apparent weakness) then fucking hell, £110,000 is a lot of money - another 5k on top of it is pretty much garnish at this point.

Exciting afternoon. I think I need a drink. o_O

Got an email from my solicitor yesterday; the other party has offered to settle at 90/10 liability (that's 90% his fault, 10% mine). She recommended that I rejected the offer, which is good because I don't intend to accept any split-liability settlement. Still, interesting that their offer has gone from 40/60 or whatever it was a few months ago, to 90/10 a few weeks before the trial.

Just to keep track, that means they've now offered me the following settlements on liability at various points over the last four years: 60/40, 75/25, 75/25, 80/20, 40/60, 90/10.

I wonder how long the argument about 'how much?' is going to take once the one about the liability is finished.

Got an email from my solictor today, she says the other side have applied to have the judgement against them 'set aside' - meaning that the full court case to settle liability still has to go ahead before we can settle the issue of compensation. So that's a pain in the arse.

I remain fairly confident about the whole thing - I was doing nothing wrong when the guy drove his car into my path, and I think that should be fairly obvious from the testimony describing the accident circumstances - but it would have been nice to have had it settled and done with. Not because I'm worried about how the court case will go, but because I'm pissed off that they have the cheek to claim and continue claiming that I could be partially responsible for his mistake - which, let us not forget, could have bloody killed me. Grrr.

From my solicitor:

Just to update you, I have not yet received any response to the Court proceedings in your claim. The time for the opponent solicitors to send me their response, known as the Defence, has now expired.

I have therefore written to the Court to ask them to enter Judgement against the opponent on a full liability (blame) basis. We are entitled to request this as a Judgement in default, as they have not complied with the time limits.

I will let you know as soon as I have any further news.

Kind regards,
etc

*blinkblink* I think I just won.