Why does n
09/01/2009

ne fear skiing and holiday injury like me?

Even before I started working for a personal injury claims company, I was scared of the kind of holiday injury that can befall a skier; I'm not what you'd call an athletic type, so much as what you'd call cerebral (if you were feeling nice) or spindly and geeky (if not). Yes, I'm more likely to be taken for a ski pole than a slalom expert.

Partly that's because my brother went out on the mountains some years ago and received a fairly nasty cut on his head after a showoffy kind of skier decided it would be very cool - is this where I get to say "gnarly"? - to use a rock to jump over him on his way down. Needless to say, it didn't go well, and my poor brother still has a scar there to show for the experience.

But now I am working here, helping with the whole compensation claim process for people who have had accidents at work, holiday accidents, and everything in between, I find myself surrounded with people who do like the sport and don't fear the broken legs and ruptured clavicles and chilly toes like me. I have a manager, in fact, who seems amazed I haven't been ever.

And it's not just work. For Christmas my sister-in law got a voucher for free skiing lessons on a Manchester dry run, and she loved it; that's one person on my side down, as she'd been one of the bulwarks against my wife's family encouraging me up the side of a mountain against my better judgment. Well, alright, against my irrational fear of suffering a holiday injury on the first day that would leave me sitting in the chalet with my leg in plaster - my legs in plaster - having no fun.

Even my hobbies are no protection; sitting in a pub after a writers' group meeting with the only other person who'd stayed on as other, less convivial, poets sloped off home, the conversation turned to everybody's favourite downhill sport and the fact that he'd recently got into it through his wife's family. He, in fact, could get me mates' rates on a privately owned cottage on the side of a slope near Lake Geneva that he sometimes got to go to for free.

I reminded him that I worked with no win, no fee solicitors and therefore knew about all the horrible things that could happen to me - tumbling cable cars, mysterious rocks, sudden crevices, being chilly - and his eyes glazed over as he told me not to worry about such things. I could practically see the conifers whipping past his mind's eye as I watched.

It's like a phobia, he told me, you could probably describe yourself as having an illness. Well, I said, if my fear of a holiday injury is a kind of illness, why would you want me to go downhill quickly?

Can I claim?