not have awoken him. The owners were, therefore, exonerated on grounds that whether or not the pilot held a license made no difference to the real cause, which was not the pilot's general level of competence, but rather his negligence at the time. Similarly, in Christopher Andrews v Barnett Waddingham LLP and RAJ Waddingham (2006) EWCA Civ 93, the claimant transferred from a "safe" employer's pension scheme to a commercial scheme on the advice of a firm of financial advisers. The breach of duty alleged was confined to advice about the protection afforded by the Policyholders Protection Act 1975 to "with-profits" annuities, and this duty was found to be breached by the first instance judge. The claimant would not have chosen the Equitable Life with-profits annuity if he had been given correct advice, but that did not entitle him to recover the loss he had sustained as a result of his acquiring the annuity. The 1975 Act would have applied if Equitable Life had become insolvent. That was not the case. The real cause of the loss was that the terminal bonuses were not guaranteed and were adversely affected by the downturn in Equitable Life's fortunes. So the negligence as pleaded and as found by the judge did not relate to the fact that the terminal bonuses were not guaranteed. In Pickford v Imperial Chemical Industries (1998) 1 WLR 1189 the Lords were asked to determine the cause of repetitive strain injury in a typist. Lord Steyn posed the question, "That immediately raises the point that there must be an explanation for the fact that she contracted PDA4. What was the cause of her PDA4? There really was no alternative on the evidence to concluding that this condition was caused by Miss Pickford's typing work." But alternative explanations are that typing might aggravate an inherent condition or generally be an unsuitable occupation for someone with a predisposition to that condition, and neither proves the legal cause. In all cases, the burden of proof is on the claimant to prove the cause as pleaded. There is no burden on the defendant to prove an alternative explanation of the cause of any loss or damage, but a failure to do so may be a factor in deciding whether the claimant's explanation of the cause should be accepted. This test works well in straightforward situations, but it proves less successful in establishing causation