I thought I ought to explain my thoughts on this fine piece of 21st century wisdom. Here, in the UK, we have what are playfully referred to as the Health and Safety Nazis. There are people in our society whose job it is to make sure the rest of us have as little fun as possible, they wander around our country looking for things that idiots could hurt themselves with and proceed to ban it, cut it down, fence it of or otherwise place us out of harms way from it. ‘What’s wrong with that’ I hear you cry ‘we’ll I’ll tell ya’ I retort. If you pay a man to make laws, he’ll make laws, as is his brief, but if you don’t tell him when to stop, he’ll carry on making laws, even when there are no laws left to make, even when common sense dictates its time to stop, even when the padded masses are screaming from the not too high roof tops, ‘please stop, your draining our collective will to live’. This machine is getting paid and as long as he’s getting paid he’s going to carry on doing what he’s getting paid for. Follow? No? Ok, example,
A Doctor’s surgery in England plant a tree outside the front door, Health and Safety Nazis cut it down for fear that the patients might slip on the berries and hurt themselves.
Every 15ft is a set of traffic lights, its impossible to get your car/bike out of 2nd gear.
CHEESE
Cheese makers in Cheshire have been made change the way they’ve made their products for 400 years, just in case somebody might get poisoned, even though in 400 years no one has ever gotten poisoned from their cheese.
I know these things might not sound like they’re worth getting annoyed about, but they’re just the tip of the Health and Safety ‘berg, this is what you have to see. I personally couldn’t give flying monkey fuck about cheese or cheese related products, but if some bloke wants to buy something that’s been rolled in pig spunk, hung for a fortnight inside a pair of wellies and then been fucked by a rabid Italian, who am I to stop him. ‘But he might die’ the Health and Safety Nazis say, ‘so fucking what’ I say, ‘he took a punt and lost, he’s an idiot and we have to many of those as it is, did you see what he ate?’ I don’t want to live in a world where everything has a crumple zone. It would be very easy to go to far with this and go completely the other way, living in world where brushing your teeth can kill you, that’s not what I mean, I’m just saying use some common sense. People have always gotten hurt, its natures way of sorting the wheat from the chaff, how is evolution supposed to work, if we dander around the planet putting a metaphorical bumper on everything and ensuring everything operates to the lowest common denominator. Give it a million of so years of that and we’re going to end up with a planet full of complete mongs, where the leader of the free world is from amongst the thickest of us……….. Oh wait that’s happened already. How droll, sorry couldn’t resist. But I digress. I don’t want my point to lose its sting so I’ll get back to it.
SURVIVING, I'M GOOD AT THAT ALREADY
In the city your never more than 5ft away from an extreme sportsman, all over the western world, young men are throwing themselves of very high things, riding very fast down very high things, and generally ‘choosing’ to place themselves in harms way, Some might simply write them of as idiots, not me, I used to count my self as one of them, then I had kids and a survival gene kicked in. I know these people to be a generally high achieving bunch, sure there are some dudes, but mostly they are very bright, funny young men, who have choose attempted suicide as a hobby. Why? They’re bored, they’re men and men like a bit of danger, and they don’t get that any other way, if they had to run the gauntlet of wild animals that want to eat them every morning to get to work, I would hazard a guess that they wouldn’t be B.A.S.E. jumping at the week end. So this is the kind of individual your dealing with and when you constantly pad his life in minute detail to prevent him from harming himself, something he’s perfectly capable of doing himself, in fact, surviving is exactly what he’s fantastic at, you crush his spirit.
Read Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk or watch the film, get The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Igullden, the people that read these look at them like a priest looks at the bible, they are guides, symbols of lost spirit, these men are saying, ‘we understand we can get hurt, we get it and we don’t care, scatter my ashes somewhere nice and make sure everybody has a good drink at the funeral’. If the Health and Safety Nazis get their way, the biggest killer in the bright new millennium is going to be deep vein thrombosis.
MY SPERM COUNT AND HEALTH AND SAFETYWe all know, that men are getting less fertile, sperm counts are wallowing in single figures for most of us, are wee fellas can barely muster the effort to pass our genetic code into the future, pretty important stuff and our testicles cant be bothered. Is this because of the crap they put in our food, I suspect it is, but add to that the powerful anti-effect of a man giving up. I’ll tell you brothers and sisters, when a man says ‘ah, Fuck it, I can’t be bothered anymore’ and means it, nothing and I mean nothing will get him up, he will cut his nose off to spite his face. And that’s what’s happening and its effects are only starting to kick in, men’s’ testicles are saying’ ah fuck it, what’s the point”. It’s that serious, the future of the human race is at risk here and I want to be noted, I’m the first to make the link between failing sperm counts and Health and Safety.
So how does, Health and Safety Kill Culture? All the best stuff, Rock n Roll, Van Gogh, the Blues, my guitar, my record label, where all born from hardship, trouble and strife, if the Health and safety guy had his way, none of these things would exist for fear of harming somebody, yes even a painting, it could fall and hurt someone, my guitar could poke someone in the eye (in fact has and will do again, it has a thirst for human blood, mostly mine, where do you think Blood on the Scratchplate came from?), the Blues, don’t get me started.
“Evil is what happens when good men do nothing”, a wiser man than me once said, well
We’re in a war my friends, its us against the Health and Safety Nazis, these jack booted bullies whose sole purpose in life is to tell us what we cannot do. We can let them do their worst and let the human race become a side note in history along with dinosaurs and Transformers Robots in disguise, or we can stand up and tell them in one manly voice,’ STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO” and then with equal pride, add, ”YOU CUNT” Oh and it’s the ‘human RACE’ not the ’human walk ‘not run’ in single file’. I thank you.
Andy (Motor Sounds Records and The Bonevilles)
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