Sunday, December 09, 2007

It's Health & Safety Gone Mad!

My favourite story of the week that went shamefully unnoticed in all newspapers, except that organ-of-truth Eastern Evening News, was the Health & Safety exectuive's attack on yet another bastion of childhood.

The Panto being shown on the pier at Great Yarmouth has apparently been told it cannot partake in the tradition of throwing sweets into the audience in case a child gets hurts by being struck on the head by one. Oh dear. Hence from now on, they will pass the sweets from the front row back, in a calm and orderly manner.

Why don't they throw jellies instead? Or do they still hurt when tossed at some velocity?

Anyway, the point is that we have lost completely the sense of "acceptable risk". Children may fall off swings. They may be hit in the eye by a conker. They may be struck on the head by a flying sweet at panto.

As a parent I've learnt to accept that and so should the Health & Safety Executive. Haven't they got better things to do?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

yes the health and safety exec have better to do and you will find this non story is about two years old and is still untrue just like the conker story fyi conkers the hse entered a team in the world conker championship with out goggles or gloves try looking on the HSE web site under myth of the month and you will find most of this is from loony councils dave

Anonymous said...

As usual it is the Health and Safety Executive that gets the blame yet it is more likely to be the theatre management or their insurance company that have caused this ridiculous state of affairs. 'Elf and Safety' take a lot of stick on behalf of weak and ineffective managers. For example, playing conkers has never been banned by the HSE but nobody would know it! This is yet another example of wrapping our young people in cotton wool in our risk averse, litigious society.

george said...

Anonymous seems to know a lot about the HSE. Is he/she a member of that Quango?

On a different topic, and for the information of anonymous, this post probably contains some symbols which he/she doesn't understand. I refer of course to the litle dots and squiggly bits which appear after certain letters in this post, not to mention the funny looking thing after the 'o' in Quango. They are called punctuation marks, which break a sentence up into smaller pieces, thus making it easier to understand. In anonymous's post they are conspicuous by their absence. Oh, and the funny little thing between s and s at the end of anonymous is an apostrophe.

samsmall