On the way there, I had called in at the supermarket. Again it was busy, lots of families. Kids playing outside. Youngest nipper I saw was pre-school I would say. They were playing on the safety railings that seperate the pavement from a busy main road. Their parents weren’t even line of sight. An old bloke said “I’d tell the little buggers to get off the railings and stay on the pavement, but I’d probably get arrested for interfering with children.”

We are too ignorant about risk, and too reliant on “them”, whoever they are. This makes our society more dangerous, not less.

It doesn’t matter that most of the frivolous claims are thrown out, every time we get a headline of someone suing because the damaged an ingrowing toe nail walking along the pavement it encourges yet more claims.

The other side of the coin is that the presence of liability insurance cover is not an indicator of safety anyway, and we shouldn’t blindly waltz in without making our own common-sense assessment of how well things are being run. If the people caught up in the Bradford Football stadium fire had only looked around, they should have noticed that they were sitting on a timber staging with an accumulation of fine kindling underneath them.

We have a responsibility to think. And if we shirk our responsibilities, we have to accept all the restrictions that nanny applies to our lives.

The small french village (pop400-500 including surrounding farms) where I’ve spent the last year hosts a summer & a winter fair both of which involve blocking the road through with dodgems & roundabouts plus a couple of smaller events. Other villages in the area are much the same & the small market town seems to have something on every other week.
A quick phone call, filtered through my lousy french, seems to indicate that events are initiated at commune level & then the responsibility for all this crap is bucked upwards through the admin levels through to department. It’s regarded as a service, which is what local taxes are paid for.
OK, France can be a bureaucracy ridden nightmare but our maire is someone I say bonjour to every day & she does have real power. If you want something to happen, you start with her & can get a result within a couple of days.

Peripherally, a big sport in Flanders is archery.* Except they do it vertically, firing at targets on the top of a 90′ tower. Most fine evenings in villages throughout the region, the local youth can be found practising with blunted arrows flying hundreds of feet into the air & several tons of steel tower being winched up & down to replace targets. Totally unsupervised. I imagine a UK safety elf would give birth to a perfectly formed kitten just thinking about it.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popinjay_(sport)