Tasteless Or What ?

Barry Beelzebub hits a brilliant new low with this piece on the Health and Safety Executive.

Let me give you a couple of examples of how far this cotton wool culture has permeated our daily lives. A friend of mine who works for a prominent firm of granny-stranglers (or financial advisors as some call them) recently managed to blag a couple of very fancy tickets to a football match. You know the ones: padded seats, luxury bar, free programme, post-96 middle-class muppet behind you, that sort of thing.

He thought this might be an ideal opportunity to introduce his four-year-old son to The Beautiful Game on the grounds that if the boy became bored with proceedings, his mother could take him downstairs to the luxury bar where they could play Stick The Tail On Emile Heskey while father watched the rest of the match in peace.

A quick phone call to the football club in question stymied the scheme. A four-year-old sitting on his father's lap? Out of the question. The child would be a clear and obvious fire hazard.

A what? A fire hazard? This is the country that became rich by sending four-year-olds up chimneys. Now I know that disabled people in cinemas are often regarded as potentially combustible, but a four-year-old kid? How many of those have you seen go up in flames in the last week? (An uneasy silence settles on the readership, understandably so.)