My trip to France revealed just how 'health and safety' obsessed UK has become

Those a few years older were in the sea, swimming to floating diving platforms where they competed to perform back flips and belly flops. On the steep-sided promenade, mums and dads sat on the edge, enjoying the sunshine and an ice cream.

None of that unfolded here but instead on a beach in France. The weather at home may be Mediterranean right now but the culture is very different, especially when it comes to our attitude to risk.

Pursuit of absolute safety

The same scene in Scotland would see the promenade lined with barriers and ‘Danger – steep drop’. Warning signs and health and safety would have closed the kids club and towed away the diving platforms to prevent anything possibly going wrong.

Yes, there is an element of risk involved in all of those activities but from that comes opportunities to learn and the chance to have fun and feel alive. The alternative is an endless pursuit of absolute safety that is impractical and doomed to fail.

In Edinburgh last week, Craighall Road in the north of the city was closed. It’s going to be shut for three years. Yes, you read that correctly, three whole years. You might think taking the decision to shut a main arterial route for such an enormous period of time, with all the disruption that entails, would be to allow some cataclysmic activity to take place.

Instead a newsletter to residents says it’s to “ensure the clear segregation between construction activities and all members of the public” while work takes place on a school. Isn’t that what fences are for? How on earth can it be necessary to close a main road for three years?

Vape dummies and kidult dolls

Inevitably it comes back again to the constant search to eliminate any risk whatsoever. It doesn’t work but worse than that, it infantilises us. The kids on the floating diving platform in France kept themselves safe by looking after each other and balancing risk and opportunity. By stripping all that away and putting signs and barriers everywhere, we are all reduced to irresponsible toddlers in need of constant protection and instruction.

From trigger warnings on Peter Pan to teenagers sucking vapes like dummies and the weird current obsession with Labubu dolls aimed at what is gaggingly called the ‘kidult’ market, the evidence that growing up is falling out of fashion is all around us and we only have ourselves to blame.

If you want to see more evidence of this, take a look at the Health and Safety Matters website which brings together the bloated industry that has developed around rules, regulations, clipboards and high-vis jackets. “Fostering an effective health and safety culture, in which individuals have the correct attitudes, values and patterns of behaviour, is now seen as of equal importance to physical safety systems,” it claims. Correct attitudes? Wow.

The terrible tragedy in Texas where over 100 people died in floods proves that, despite the best-laid plans of mice and men, life and death just happens. So let’s choose living over a life spent fearing.