Furious , anybody any advice other than a stiff drink?

Wow are you related to a Bulldog Shiney?! Good for you. I doubt I'll get as much success but have taken the plunge and got my solicitor to scratch a letter to my council, he's done it for nothing as he's a keen gardener and we did a swap for his time and some of my Aconites and Snowdrops of which I have 1000s.Maybe his letter will make them take me seriously as so far no response to my FOI. I wish I'd been present when the bailiffs arrived...love it. Perhaps if there were more around like you these huge organisations would treat joe public with a little more respect.

 

So bartering is still alive and well Silu!

 

Sure is!

 

Shiney, what an impressive fellow you are. I'm a determined, dogged guy too but have to commend you

 

Funny how a solicitor's letter bears fruit! I now have the info that I need. What I don't know is whether it would be deemed reasonable that the Council took from 25th November until 22nd of Dec to even request permission from the Electricity and Gas companies to commence works.The permissions were granted more or less immediately but by then most of the trouble caused had happened. The huge delay between works commencing (7th Jan) and road finally tarmaced (12th Feb) was due solely to the council "managers" not having a clue about culverts and capacity needed to cope with the overflow from the loch at times and consequently the pathetic 1st attempt had to be completely disregarded and an adequate (hopefully!) alternative created . If a couple of men with shovels had been employed in the 1st place then no permissions would have been necessary and as it transpired the gas pipe was about 40 metres from any digging, and power lines never really involved either. I'll speak with my solicitor tomorrow and see what he thinks. I could never understand why the council didn't make a bigger effort to unblock the original ancient culvert which had caused no problems that anybody can remember since it's creation around Victorian times until it blocked last November. I found out the answer today. The council deemed it prudent to decommission it so that they wouldn't have to unblock it in the future. Good god I wonder just how many years would go by before it blocked again if ever and how many unblockings could we have had for what it has cost to create a new 1.I reckon this fiasco must have cost at least £20,000 and could be much more. To me unblock the old 1, repair where necessary and put up a grill to stop anything large blocking it in the future...sorted. This is EXACTLY what our neighbouring farmer wanted done, but then we were in the hands of "experts"!!!

 

I had to re-read that Shiney. I thought you said 'dis-embowelling as a weapon' for a second.

 

Well done. Makes you wonder how these managers get their jobs in the first place. My best result was taking my estate agents to court to get my deposit back on the new house I'd wanted to buy. I'd paid the deposit but the re-registration of the house was taking ages. Eventually, after a few phone calls we found out the owner of the house had got divorced. His ex-wife was claiming ownership of the house and the sale was blocked. I asked the estate agents for my money back; £9,000, since the block was in place before they'd signed the deposit contract with me. They offered nothing - they arranged the house sale, they did their job, they said. So I made them an 'offer': they can hold on to my money if they pay my exhorbitant fee-schedule. If they are still holding onto my money after 10 days, I will treat that as an 'acceptance' of my 'offer'. After ten days they were still holding on to my money and offered a third of it back, which I rejected. Eventually I decided I'd better take them to court soon in case they go bust or something. So I took them to court and got the full amount back plus costs. They appealed, but sent in the appeal one day after the time-limit, the noggins. The best thing was, I was still contracted to the house owner. Eventually he sorted his dispute with his ex-wife out and the sale went ahead, albeit a year late. He'd also put a kitchen in there so that he could rent it out in the year he couldn't sell it. So I got the house, plus a kitchen, for a lot less than I'd expected. Most of that £9,000 windfall is now in long-term account for little Cacadore.

 

Sounds good!

I got involved in the law when a client I was arranging training courses for refused to pay me near the end of the course because some of their trainees had left the company. They refused to even pay my costs, which were substantial. When I went to see their boss he just smirked and told me there was nothing I could do. They were a firm of debt collectors! The solicitor I hired advised me to continue to send trainers to the client even though they refused the training. She got my outstanding fees paid, but managed to claim costs for herself even though I'd paid all her costs, not to mention the trainers' fees for doing nothing! She also turned up late to meetings and kept me in the dark all the way through. I thought, 'never again'. When clients haven't paid since then, I've dealt with them myself and represented myself in court. It's scarey and a little debilitating to your life to have a court date hanging over you but it's also fun in a way because the lawyers seldom prepare properly when they know I've had no legal training. They come in coasting and are always surprised when I take their cases apart. It's a great feeling when you pull out a statement in front of a judge that directly contradicts everything the other party's lawyer just said!

 

Who needs expensive solicitors when we can rely on fellow members for advice as good as this.

 

A quick update and closure to this sage of council incompetence.Firstly a huge thank you to all who gave such good advice and shoulder to cry on.As things have turned out, the damage to the garden has been minimal miraculously. To my amazement the vast majority of the Snowdrops survived despite being submerged for nearly 3 months! They were very late in comparison to others which weren't in the flooded area and I thought they'd bought it but no, most came up and flowered. Likewise the Daffodils, altho many of those have brown tips on their leaves so didn't enjoy being waterlogged.Hostas which like the Snowdrops were under water for weeks are fine and so far the Rhododendrons and Azaleas look healthy too and are either flowering or about to. SO fingers crossed the financial loss re my garden is likely to be verging on the non existant.

After some email ping pong between me, my solicitor and council an out of court settlement has eventually been reached with a proviso that should I discover plants fail due to having been saturated between now and the autumn I can look to be further compensated. While the settlement isn't huge it does cover the extra fuel we used due to our road being closed for weeks and weeks plus a bit for all the stress and inconvenience. My solicitor reckoned the only reason the council were prepared to cough up was because they REALLY didn't want me going to the local paper re how they couldn't even work out the simplest maths, took months to fix a let's face it minor problem and spent god knows how much on making a mountain out of a mole hill.

I haven't got the cheque yet but have already spent the money! on some new shrubs. They'll be nice but to be honest I'd rather have not had to go through all the bu....... about. I was tempted to not reach a settlement, go to court and embarrass the council, however my solicitor said that I had to be careful not to look greedy and unreasonable ending up as "the bad guy".

What I have learnt from all of this is that plants/bulbs can be extremely good at surviving against all the odds/ expert opinion which is good to know.

Thanks again all.