Playing it too safe

I heard the other day from a colleague that a Christmas tree at his place of work had only been half decorated—from the bottom up—because colleagues were insisting on a cherry picker to decorate the upper reaches of the tree safely. I have no idea how high the tree was but being an indoor one in an office, I imagine that it was easily dwarfed by the one at Trafalgar Square. Whatever happened to stepladders, and what has happened to our common sense? My wife and I, neither of us spring chickens, have managed to decorate our seven foot tree without ending up in hospital. It was touch and go at a few points, but we have survived to tell the tale.

Then this morning, the Met office issued a severe weather warning. It is going to be frosty with a risk of snow and we all ought to be jolly worried and take extra care as we go about what is left of our lawful business in the UK. Forgive my lack of concern, but did this not used, simply, to be called ‘winter’? As far as I recall it happens with sickening regularity approximately once a year. And for reasons that are beyond me, it always happens around the same time of year.

We tend not to get severe weather warnings in summer, but we did this year. It was awfully hot for a few days, and we all had to be told to carry water, open our windows, take it easy, find some shade and avoid physical exertion. With half the population ‘working’ from home and the other half suffering from ‘long Covid’ we didn’t need much encouragement to take it easy. I have spent prolonged periods in the Far East, South East Asia and Australia in summer where it’s a heatwave every day. Remarkably, life goes on as usual.

If I am not mistaken, we have become addicted to safety. Bags of nuts that ‘may contain nuts’, hot drinks of which the ‘contents may be hot’, electrical devices that ‘should not be dismantled’ (as if!), toxic substances that ‘should not be ingested’, alcoholic drinks which should be ‘consumed within safe limits’ and a veritable forest of road signs accompanied by the whole rainbow spectrum of paint on our roads directing us here, preventing us from going there and, my favourite, ‘hold the handrail’ recorded messages when you step on to an escalator. The wonderful Peter Hitchens recorded in MailOnline the ludicrous array of signs on the steps out of Paddington Station in London where the steps warn you to ‘Take care’, ‘No mobiles’, ‘Hold handrail’, ‘Don’t rush’ and ‘One step at a time.’ I’ve seen this with my own eyes, and I nearly tripped over trying to read them.

Of course, the Covid panic was a case par excellence of our addiction to safety. This was seen both in the general response which imposed the precautionary principle on us in ways we could never have imagined, and in the ensuing response which has left some citizens a mass of quivering jelly at the thought of breathing the same air as other people. What else could explain the chap I nearly mowed down in my car the other night? It was pitch dark and pouring with rain, yet he crossed my path sans bicycle lights and sans helmet. But I am happy to report, he was wearing a face mask. I cannot have been the only one who spotted the irony in the story of the lady who isolated herself for nine months in fear of Covid-19, only to be run over by a lorry and killed on her first day out, searching in her handbag for a face mask while crossing the road. OK, maybe it was just me but, equally, I was furious with our glorious leaders who inflicted the Covid regime upon us without prior consideration of the consequences and without subsequent apology for their actions. It was they who frightened the lady above into prioritising avoidance of a mild infection over full contact with several tons of steel travelling at high speed. The real irony is that the face mask she was trying to find would have been just as effective at stopping the lorry as preventing infection with Covid.

But we’re over all that now, I hear you say. Well, not so fast. Only this week an ‘infectious disease expert’ from Leeds University—Dr Stephen Griffin—reckons face masks should be worn again to prevent infection with Strep A (the disease formerly known as ‘scarlet fever’) which is killing school children. He says that face masks would have a ‘tremendous impact at decreasing transmission’. But they won’t and if he is any kind of expert he must know that. It was probably the masking up, social isolation and locking down of our kids that has reduced their immunity and made them more vulnerable to Step A in the first place.

I could try making up better stories, but why bother when they would not surpass the real ones?

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.