A weird announcement this morning on the platform while waiting for the train – on Saturday November 1, trains would not be calling at Battersea Park “due to health and safety reasons”. The platform at Battersea Park is miles away from the actual park where Saturday sees the annual firework display. Nevertheless, someone in a position of responsibility has evidently decided that the risk of a stray rocket killing a child is so great that the trains can’t stop there.

There was a story on the radio the other morning about how the Forestry Commission is phasing out licenses for individuals to forage for firewood, citing “health and safety reasons”. The right to forage, according to the retired builder who has been doing this for the previous 12 years without poking out his own eye on a stray twig and who plans to protest against this, was enshrined in the Magna Carta in 1215. Now, however, it is too dangerous.

In September, a story came out about how workers for Chichester Council could not enter a four inch deep stream to retrieve a rubbish bin because no-one was qualified to wear Wellington boots and a safety harness.

I was one of a number of people going for a pub lunch last weekend. When we asked if it was possible to push some tables together, we were told sorry no, for “health and safety reasons”.

In the future expect firework displays, hot drinks, crossing the road, touching water and getting out of bed in the morning to be banned altogether “due to health and safety reasons”. Ice cream will be banned in case anyone has sensitive teeth and feels a nasty little twinge. Sellotape will be banned in case anyone using it without training accidentally manages to lose an eyebrow. Oranges will be banned in case you’re peeling one and the juice accidentally shoots into your eye rendering you blind. And paper will be banned in case you accidentally give yourself an arterial bleed handling a photocopy. I hear Lynn Faulds Wood in my head, holding up a ham sandwich, grimly announcing “this could be a potential deathtrap”.

A TV advert for yet another ‘have you had an accident in the last three years?’ ambulance-chasing compensation firm features a man, doubtless an actor, describing how he was up a ladder doing some repairs, but it was the wrong kind of ladder, so he fell and injured himself. It’s all good though because he got thousands in compensation. If it was the wrong kind of ladder, why the fuck did he go up the ladder?

Kathleen Gilliam famously sued McDonalds for half a million dollars for serving ‘dangerously hot’ coffee that resulted in third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay after she spilled it in her lap. What the hell was she doing with it in her lap, trying to thaw out her front bottom? And how can coffee be ‘dangerously hot’?

People have been told that it’s OK to sue the council for a lopsided paving slab, or the council are just terrified of anyone suing them. Obvious accessibility issues for wheelchair users and the elderly aside, most people should have the common sense to look where they’re going, but apparently they don’t. Words get thrown about in these cases like ‘victim’ and ‘ordeal’ when, just maybe, more appropriate words would be ‘cretin’ and ‘blown-up out of all proportion’.

This has to stop. It infantilises us all, and erodes our freedom, creating instead the freedom described in The Handmaid’s Tale as ‘freedom from’, not ‘freedom to’. Obviously the vulnerable need to be protected and injuries needs to be prevented, but the ‘where there’s blame there’s a claim’ culture has got to go, and that might just start with people taking more responsibility for themselves so the ambulance chasers have less to chase.

If I had the money I’d set up a phone line and put out TV adverts asking people if they’d had an accident in the last three years – if anyone then called up saying that they had fallen off the wrong kind of ladder the operator would say “well what did you do that for, you plonker?”.

Now if you don’t mind I’m off outside to light a firework with a hot coffee in my lap up the wrong kind of ladder while I look for firewood in a four-inch stream. Yeah. I live life on the edge.