Modern-day life is certainly prone to the odd minor mishap ...but wind the clock back over 150 years and the most ordinary events appeared to end in the most extraordinary way.
Recently unearthed documents from Aviva's archives reveal an amazing catalogue of customers' accident claims dating back to the 1860s.*
From falls over croquet hoops and vats of liquor, to bites by ferrets and fish, to blows in the eye from ammonia stoppers and catapults, Victorian life was clearly very colourful.. and what's more where there was pain - there was a claim.
Discarded orange peel, not banana skins, errant horses, and simple general clumsiness are revealed as some of the major hazards of the day.
Examples of the most calamitous claims from Aviva customers from the 1860s to early 1900s:
A grocer from Lancashire slipped while playing Blind Man's Buff - £15 paid in 1878
A merchant from Essex injured his eye from throwing rice at a wedding - £50 paid in 1892
A tailor from Launceston, Cornwall missed his chair when going to sit down - £58 paid in 1887
An artist from Swansea blown down by gale of wind - £30 paid in 1886
A shipbuilder from Great Yarmouth swallowed a fishbone - £1000 paid in 1900
A pawnbroker from Brighton injured by a bucket of mortar thrown on his head while walking in the street - £35 paid in 1895
A merchant from Glasgow injured while jumping out of bed to catch his wife who had fainted - £42 paid in 1895
A pharmacist from Dublin slipped on marble steps in a Turkish bath - £33 paid in 1885
A travelling salesman from Belfast hit his head on a pole while watching an accident from the top of a tram - £7 paid in 1904
An innkeeper from Handsworth, Birmingham, took poisonous potion in mistake for a sleeping medicine - £1000 paid in 1878.
Rob Townend, director of property claims at Aviva said: "These amazing records just go to show that as far back as 1860, people still looked to insurance to help them in their hour of need - when they were faced with unforeseen and unfortunate events in their lives and, of course, that is still true today.
"Obviously insurance claims change as lifestyles change, but some incidents appear to be as common back then as they are today. Even in prim and proper Victorian times people were still tripping up kerbs, falling on ice and slipping on cobbled streets, albeit back then discarded orange peel appeared to be the major culprit. The supposedly more traditional slipping hazard, the banana skin, makes just one appearance in our archives, back in 1904.
"And of course clumsiness is a human trait rather than a historic one - we have found a boot maker from Hampshire who injured himself slipping on soap and upsetting a saucepan and a merchant from Solihull who fell down the stairs after getting his foot caught in his pyjamas.
"On the positive side it certainly seems that the work place is a lot safer now that it was back then - the archives show claims from a grocer who was hit on the head by a box of bacon, a pork butcher who caught his hand in the sausage-maker and the publican who injured himself ejecting a drunken man!"
The personal accident policies covered a wide range of professions and groups, from rail passengers and fox hunters to surgeons and solicitors. Personal Accident insurance arrived a few decades before the launch of motor car and burglary policies, but many years before the bespoke kind of home, car and travel insurance that Aviva offers today.
Anna Stone, archivist at Aviva, has spent months poring over the documents for an exhibition in the insurer's General Insurance headquarters in Norwich.
"It has certainly proved to be interesting reading material and I have to say I do have some personal favourites that stand out for their sheer peculiarity - like the vicar from Shropshire who fell while playing a game of Leap Frog, or the gentleman from Mold in Wales who missed a dog while trying to kick it and struck a sofa instead, injuring his big toe!
"Sport injuries are also commonplace, with slips during fencing, blows from hockey sticks and golfers rupturing legs getting out of bunkers - not to mention the clerk from Worcester who received £36 for an injury caused by a blow from a fellow bather's heel sustained while diving."
But the personal accident policies weren't just for the man in the street, in 1896 the Aviva company, Accident Insurance Ltd, acquired its most well-known customer - a 21-year-old Winston Churchill, who was then a young officer in the 4th Queen's Own Hussars.
By 1958 Churchill was the longest-standing customer on the company's personal accident books and unlike his peers - who in the early 1900s were falling in to crevasses on the Alps, rupturing muscles while dancing and being injured by backfiring motor cars - records show that the man who would go on to be one of Britain's greatest Prime Ministers, never made a claim.
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