Neck injury can be a tricksy thing. If you've been injured in an accident that was someone else's fault, make sure there's a paper trail now. If your doctor says it'll clear up in a few days, good, but I've known people be in a neck brace for a couple of months and those people have quite righly wanted a bit of compensation for it.

A friend familiar with road traffic accidents claims that the first thing anyone should say when getting out of the vehicle after an accident is "ow, my neck", simply because the severity of neck injuries can be hard to determine initially and it's good to stake your claim as soon as possible. I'm not sure I'd go quite that far.


I'm also glad Direct Line is sorting things out for you. I'm insured with Norwich UnionAviva, who are competitively priced and did at least sort my claim out for me eventually (it tool eleven months). To be fair, that was partly because the other party's insurer, Zurich, routinely dispute claims even when the person they've insured has reversed a lorry into a parked car leaving witnesses and photographic evidence.

Then again, on a previous occasion when I was a witness to an accident, Norwich Union pissed me off so much that I stopped co-operating with them, even though their driver had been in the right: they got someone to phone me who had no map of the accident scene, a speech impediment and quite a poor grasp of how roundabouts worked.