Crap Parents at Harry Ramsden's

So there I am last night, sitting outside at Harry Ramsden's (for those of you not in the know, this is possibly one of the finest fish and chip shops in the world, now with an outlet reasonably near you!) eating my fish supper (how I got there is a long story, involving broken ankles and wallpaper, and is perhaps for another time) and looking at the family at the next picnic-table over.

There's a mum and a dad and a girl aged about 13ish and a boy aged about 10ish, and I'm drawn to them for all the usual reasons. Like, dad's wearing sports gear and doesn't seem to be the type that can actually remember the last time he was out of breath; the mum is more than a little overweight and wearing shall we say inappropriately tight pedal pushers. The daughter is the same, only more overweight and wearing even tighter clothes, and the son looks pretty average considering.

Anyway, I'm getting off the point. Which is, that the kids were playing in the specially made play area with a slide, rocking horse type things on a spring, and a see-saw, when the boy comes limping back with a pouty lip and whining that he's got a splinter in his backside from the see-saw.

The dad offers to have a look, rolls down his shorts (out of the view of the other diners) and the kid starts balling his eyes out - and I mean like he was being murdered. He was screaming and jerking and wailing, and I seriously expected his leg to be hanging by a scrap of flesh judging by the noise he was making. In an attempt to placate him, his mother and sister were effectively pinning him to a bench and shouting at him to calm down; you can guess how effective that was...

After some five minutes (and the offending article presumably still lodged bone deep and close to an artery), they carry him into the main restaurant muttering things about "compensation". I could see that they were met by a man in a tie who, after being on the receiving end of some gesticulation, took them off into the depths of the building. I sat there for a good half-hour afterwards, and they hadn't emerged by the time I left, so maybe the surgeon ran into difficulties...

What outraged me were two things, the first being the ineptitude of the parents in dealing with the 'splinter' in the first place, i.e. lets get him screaming at the top of his voice from obvious discomfort, but continue to do it with no thought for his mental state.

Secondly though - and this is the biggie - is their attitude to something that 'in my day' would have been put down to 'just one of those things'. So he's managed to pick up a splinter from a wooden seesaw, and they automatically want to lay the responsibility at the door of somebody else? What kind of abdication of parental duty is that? Had the see-saw collapsed and broken his arm (or ankle, which would have been much more painful I bet...) then I could understand it, but a splinter? From a piece of wood? Get a grip!!!

We are hurtling down the liability highway to a nanny state dead end. Pretty soon everything that happens will be somebody else's fault, and they'll have to pay out for not stopping it. And where do you think this money will come from? Higher prices and less choice.

We are also creating a generation of people who can't accept that sometimes accidents happen and that there are such things as common sense and personal accountability. You've scalded your tongue on a hot pie? Hmm, perhaps you should have blown on it and tested the heat before shovelling it in. You're a fireman and want compensation because the sight of a burned body has upset you so much? What did you expect when you joined the fire brigade - that it'd all be kittens stuck up trees and ladies in bathtubs?

It's An Outrage!!

One of the reasons that Britain is so far 'behind' the US in terms of litigation is that up until recently all our Judges were old enough to have been through at least one world war and seen some real suffering. As such they were apt to treat with disdain many of the cases that came before them on the basis that the claimants needed to get a bit of a backbone, pull themselves together and get on with it.

Not so now, as a younger breed of judiciary come to the fore that have seen only the excesses of our trans-Atlantic cousins and think that this is the way to go.

It isn't. Very soon we will be wondering where all our kid's playgrounds went and why all the soup in restaurants is tepid, and why you just can't buy a beefburger from a street vendor anymore. And it'll all be the fault of that kid with the splinter in his arse...