Elf & Safety Gone Mad - Again!

Mum says the ‘elf & safety police’ have struck again – they want to change the wording to the Police Bravery Awards as follows:

They claim that the current citation - praising officers for acting 'with no thought to his or her safety' - sends out the wrong message and should be toned down to 'fully recognising the risks to their own safety'.

Mum started ranting and kind of gnashing her teeth and jumping up and down and screaming lots and saying “stoopid fooking eediots where will it end?” and then Uncle Hugh asked her if she had something that he calls PMS and that made her even MORE mad and so Uncle Hugh went for a drive and I retired to my basket under the table.

I don’t know what the Police Bravery Awards are. Maybe they are for policemen who arrest the most homeowners who've attacked folk whilst they've been burgling their home, which is against the law in the UK unless you’ve done a risk assessment first – I’m sure that’s what mum said, or something like that.

Anyway, I did some research on this ‘elf & safety’ thing in the UK and apparently it’s so bad that someone has even wrote a book about it called “Playing It Safe” that tells of some very, very strange regulations that the ‘elf & safety police’ have drawn up in the UK. A few examples of some very daft things they’ve done

• An ice cream shop was banned from pouring it’s sticky toppings on its ice-creams in case some fell on the floor and made someone slip (can’t they just mop it up or can’t people just look where they’re going?)
  
• A village was banned from flying bunting at its village fete because it was deemed to be a hazard (it had been doing it for 100 years without incident)
  
• A fireman was stopped by his superior from throwing a lifeline to a drowning man because he hadn’t completed a ‘risk assessment’ and told him to ring the Coast Guard instead (they were in the landlocked midlands).
  
• A firm stopped their staff from putting up Christmas decorations because their insurance didn’t cover their employees standing on chairs or climbing up ladders (their insurers told them they would have to recruit professionals to do it)
  
• A 2yr old couldn’t have her paddling pool in the back garden unless she had a life guard (requires no comment).
  
  I could go on but I won’t because it makes me very depressed.