I don't understand why the other side have not been pushing for this to be resolved either. Surely they have been badgering Aviva for settlement? If not then they have been inactive too.

Can't answer that one, the variables are so many, best not to think about the whats and why's, just how Aviva are going to resolve this for you.

Firstly, I have been offered compensation from Aviva for their poor service and I don't know whether it's fair or not but apparently I can go to the Ombudsman if I don't agree. So how does all that work? More importantly, it sounds like they are going to invoke their clause where they can decide what to do whether it's what I want or not, otherwise why would they mention it?

I have sent them a photo of where the shunt happened so they can see how narrow the road is at the point of impact and it should be clear that there is not room for two cars to pass side by side.

At first they said I couldn't claim for the damage to my car because I didn't have it any more but now they are saying they can get an engineer to look at the photos of the damage to assess how much it would have cost. Originally I said I didn't want to make a claim because I thought the other party was just notifying them of the incident and I had no idea she was actually making a claim for £1,350 until a couple of weeks ago. Had I known that 15 months ago I would certainly have counterclaimed for damages while I still had the car.

Just as an aside, when the Aviva rep on this forum asked me to send my details it would appear the emails weren't being received so just in case there was a problem with my usual email I sent the details again using a completely new email address I had never used before. Within 4 hours of Aviva receiving that email I had 2 spam emails and received another one yesterday! According to one website about how spammers get email addresses, it said there are 4 ways for this to happen: (1) spammers buy lists, (2) spammers use harvesting programs to scrape the internet, (3) spammers use brute force programs like hackers and (4) leaving your address details on online subscription services.

Their description for point (1) is "Buying illegal lists of real people's email is surprisingly commonplace. Dishonest employees of ISP's will sometimes sell information that they take from their work servers. This can happen on eBay or on the black market. From outside the ISP, hackers can also break in and steal ISP customer lists and then sell those addresses to spammers."

I can only assume that this is what has happened to me as nobody else has this address but Aviva.