The Health & Safety Policy stops here......

Hey ho! The builders are here to start last year’s Quinquennial repairs to the Vicarage. Since we have the two Dobermans living with us, getting men in and out of the house is something of a pantomime. You enter the first doors, with all your gear (for you do not want to make this journey often) then close ‘em before opening the Front door proper of the house. This means the dogs can’t escape to the street when they rush to greet you, and inspect the gear, before they will consent to allow you inside further. This is not because they are fierce, but rather because they are curious; and like big puppies they simply delight in having your attention: they’ll take any excuse to make you delay while they lick you to death. Mind you, it isn’t easy to persuade the builders there is so little to fear..... and, since everyone is out at their work, it means muggins gets to stay home and babysit the builders and dogs. Apparently my work can wait.

No matter, I have been putting off for ages the drafting of our revised Health & Safety at work policy (No parish is complete without one, for Salvation is no longer by Faith, but entirely by Health Safety at Works, provided you are also CRB cleared, of course...) This will be a good chance to make myself finish it in time for the Annual Church Meetings. The H&S policy is not merely intrinsically annoying, it is also an occasion of irritation, because we had a man who would have loved doing it, but illness struck and he can’t do it. So it landed back on my desk. The H & S policy really does stop here, apparently.

The way the English interpret this sort of well-intentioned European legislation always intrigues me. It somehow calls up a sort of instinctive frustration, an assumption that what comes from Brussels will inevitably be dreary and bureaucratic which we therefore disdain. As Jack Johnson used to say, ‘this Health and Safety will be the death of us all’.

But for most of us this is a front. Napoleon was wrong. We aren’t a nation of shopkeepers. No. Secretly, I suspect, the English are Nature’s bureaucrats par excellence. Bereft now of an Empire to govern, we have no outlet for our natural gift of getting completely lost in the most mind-numbingly dreary minutiae of administering anything. So when stuff arrives from Brussels, our first action is to obscure it, with great glee. The more we can complicate it, no matter how absurdly, the better. And it can all be blamed on someone else ! What joy !

If we had realised before, we’d never have delayed joining the EEC - we’d have been there in Rome tapping our quill pens, waiting with an huge Treaty ready-made with hundreds of clauses and sub-sub-clauses in leather bound, gold embossed triplicate copies, ready to sign while France and Germany were still wondering what to do next.

We have always done much the same with anything from the continent. Even our most European folk, the Roman Catholics. Years ago the Pope sent a little note round which the English received with dismay for it bade them, they decided, cancel Benediction. Many folk were distressed at this, but being used to what came from the continent, dutifully cancelled services and turned away unhappy congregations of the faithful, who wandered off wondering what the world was coming to, like Anglicans bereft of the Book of Common Prayer.

Some time later a monastic person from England, studying at Rome, took to task a friend from the Curia about this - how insensitive Rome could be, not realising the harm these central dictates might do, and he quoted the example of this, and how sad folk had been, and how many congregations of good people had been turned away because of it. The man from the Curia raised his eyes to heaven in despair. You English! Why on earth must you always be so literalistic? Apparently the Holy Father’s little billet-doux was never intended to have that effect. How could we imagine him to be so insensitive? It was meant to allow changes in services, not demand closures. What on earth did they think they were doing cancelling them all?

Heard something like that somewhere before?
Maybe about Health & Safety regulations being really intended to address problems in industry where many folk were needlessly injured and killed. It is, of course, an anglo-saxon thing. The influence of America, too; or rather of some American legal thinking about blame and the compensation-culture. Only, who but the English could turn sensible European H&S regulation into a reason for banning symphony orchestras and wasting money pushing over gravestones ....

We should begin a new series of Jokes.
Not about how many hands does it take to change a light bulb, but how may regulations.....