Accident clams for woks and no win no fee


When writing about no win no fee claims there are some unfortunate typos to be had – we have had articles about personal injury clams and wok accidents, but my most common personal mishap is "now inn ofee".

When I was growing up, there were only two places that adults could get alcohol – licensed premises such as pubs or restaurants, and the off-licence. Supermarkets had not got their grubby mits on the money making bomb that is booze at that time and if you wanted a bottle of Blue Nun to go with your Lasagne or some cans of Heineken for a Tuesday tipple then you went to the local offee.

Off-licences are still around, but they are not the hives of Friday night high Street activity that they used to be and like most of the population out there, if I want to sup a sip of cider at home, I generally get it along with the tins of beans and the toilet rolls when I do my weekly shop.

But, I digress, back to my typo – now inn ofee. In my twenties I left the metropolis and lived for a time in a sleepy Somerset village that possessed a strictly 9am to 5pm corner shop, a post office and a pub, called the Gainsborough, in which I worked. It was very much a local watering hole, with a strict delineation between public bar and lounge – carpet and leather chairs in the lounge, and tiles and wooden benches in the public side. And the two sides were split by the bar itself. At the end of the servery was a little hatch and this represented the village off-licence.

So, every so often, particularly on a Friday, I would hear a little knock on the wooden hatch and I would have to go and serve those customers who did not wish to venture inside.

Most of the time I would be able to tell the order just by looking at the person on the other side - four bottles of stout for the woman from Clay Terrace, two Lager and two Babycham for Terry and Sue, a bottle of white wine for Clare, and her mum would have red (or a half bottle of Port on special occasions (wine itself was an innovation enough in the depths of Somerset, we didn't offer any more than red or white) and then of-course there were the kids.

And this is what made me think of the typo; the landlord, who was a grumpy old sort and not one to seemingly have any sort of a soft spot for the young scallywags of the village, kept the tiny counter behind the wooden hatch chock full of all sorts of sweets and confectionery. You name it, it was there – penny chews, twopenny laces, chocolate frogs, and a magical type of gobstopper that turned your tongue all the colours of the rainbow and ended by fizzing your mouth into a frenzied froth.

It was the bane of my young life when these kids came to the window – they would have heard the cry. "They're in the offee – whizzlechops - he's got ‘em in again."

And that was it, the village kids would descend with their warm damp pennies clutched in sticky fists and they would stare up at me in my ivory tower of sweet shop heaven. They would um and arr as they tried to work out what combination of whizzlechops and spaceships they could purchase with their 23p (all in ones and twos of course) and I would stand, not particularly patiently, as we went through their very personalised orders.

We didn't need a sign – "Whizzlechops – now in at the offee" - word of mouth was far more effective and although at the time it seemed to me to be the most painful thing in the world to stand on a freezing winter evening at that little wooden hatch as a snotty seven year old in a snorkel parka, three sizes too big, stood and deliberated interminably over whether his pocket money was better spent on pop and crisps or Fuzzywuzzy Doodlechews, now as I labour over no win, no fee compensation copy, I am longing for the days of pulling pints and watching the daily lives of the locals as they went lazily by.



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