On a visit to London one of the things my Sister-in-law and her husband noticed was that there seemed to be some warnings which where to all intents and purposes obvious. For example when travelling on the Tube the warning to stand clear of the closing doors, the message given before the doors close was seen as superfluous. Isn't it obvious that you need to keep out of the way of the doors as they close? Isn't the audible alarm enough to warn you? In the UK we are familiar with the culture of litigation and therefore the explosion of obvious warnings which we used to take for granted as competent adults.
In fact as a child if I were to hurt myself say on a bouncy castle then my parents would just tell me to be more careful in future, it was part of growing up. Now though, we expect to be told, have warning signs and be supervised when we use these things and God help them if they end up with someone getting injured.
There are warnings to look left and right at crossings, to stand back from platforms, to mind the steps, beware hot contents (in hot plastic cups with coffee in them), hot pies, etc etc. In Belgium it appears that the local population do not need to be warned of such things, they learn from experience that there are things out there which they need to be careful with. I do admire the country for being sensible in this respect.
Mind you, if you see how they manage road works then you must wonder how more people are not killed on a regular basis. The road works are best described as dodgy, there is a section on my commuter route which shifts two lanes towards the hard shoulder in order to bypass a bridge that they are not working on, I say not as I have never seen any workmen doing anything with it as long as I have been commuting back and forth since August last year. Anyway, the traffic 'cones' that guide you on and off the road are rather short and sharp, in fact so much so that I have seen cars in the slow lane cut straight across, ignoring the guiding lines to go right. What this means is that the car on the left crashes into the side of the car that makes the mistake, brakes hard (and possibly gets rear ended) or smashes through the cones (I have seen the wrecked cones giving evidence of a previous incident). Now imagine if there were any workmen there too, thank God they are never about!
The Brits on the other hand have absolutely shedloads of cones that guide the drivers well before any changes, along with average speed cameras and appropriate limits that people generally keep to. We even have people working on the road works too, it is so much more efficient.
What of other health and safety then? Well when the builder was working on our house the lift they used was interesting, I am not entirely sure if it was certified as fit for purpose or indeed stable. I was however going up and down all day on the thing carting bricks up and down. I suspect that a builder (a decent one) in the UK would construct a scaffold next to the house and it would be almost nuclear proof. There was a plank of wood from the roof to the lift, this would make contact with the lift as it got to the top. There were no hand rails and I would push the wheelbarrow across the gap. It is a different attitude to the whole subject. Although An tells me that she doubts whether it conformed to normal practice in Belgium. I have to say that I have noticed cranes with loads suspended above the street when they have shut down and gone for beer and frietjes. There seems to be no consideration that the load may fall or swing into things, maybe incidents do happen but no more so than anywhere else?
I won't begin to talk about playgrounds, you should see the stuff they have in these places, the kids love it but a British health and safety guru would have kittens. There are far too many high things to fall off, fast moving bits to hit people and quite frankly hard objects that can cause injury. How on earth will Belgian kids get to adulthood with such dangerous places to grow up and no one supervising them either, I fear for them. I remember having to face these challenges myself and boy was it....oh hang on, I actually survived! Maybe I was really lucky?
I will leave you with a classic phrase from my childhood relating to being picked on by much older and bigger kids. My parents used to say, 'the bigger they are, the harder they fall', complete and utter tosh. The bigger they are the more they can kick seven bells out of you if you get caught. David and Goliath is a story in the Bible and unless you are a ninja then generally speaking bigger people (when you are a kid) are best as either allies or avoided. You would not believe it now but I was a very fast runner.
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