‘You’ll have someone’s eye out with that!’

Posted by Verity on February 14, 2023 in Blog, Consumer issues, Health, Humour, Living today | 2 comments

What’s the French for ‘You’ll have someone’s eye out with that’? You might be able to come up with a literal translation, but a colloquial one would be more of a challenge, because I suspect they just don’t think like that.

On the news, on any given day, there is certain to be one item that will provoke the cry ‘Health and Safety Gone Mad!’ Yet my childhood was beset with warnings about disasters that were just a whisker away, and that I had to be very vigilant to prevent: if I stuck my head out of a train window, decapitation by another train was bound to follow; likewise, if I stuck my hand out of a car, it was certain to be torn off by another car driving too close.

But cross the Channel, and you see all sorts of body parts sticking out of cars. You also see children roaming free around their interiors and sometimes sitting on a lap in the front seat. (Never mind driving in France, just being a passenger is so scary that I consider it my duty to focus all my concentration on mentally deflecting collisions, and I could never relax, stick my feet up on the dashboard and paint my toenails, as I’ve seen some front seat passengers do — though I imagine Mr Verity would be none too keen on that anyway.)

And on my first holiday to France as a child, it seemed that no one had ever said to the French children playing on the beach, ‘Don’t throw stones, because if you do you might blind someone, and then how would you feel for the rest of your life?’ Neither had they warned them that if you provoke a cat it will scratch you.

Building sites also reveal some hair-raising differences in approach, with Spanish practices including techniques such as holding together two live wires that just happen to be hanging around to provide a temporary electricity supply to boil a kettle. And where are the colourful rags that flutter from long things poking out of the backs of vans and lorries?

Are we Brits too cautious, or is this catastrophic thinking about potential daily hazards just part of our general miserabilist tendency, the one that also makes us relish bad news and worse weather?*

Or — and this is my theory — is there a deep scar in the national psyche stemming from King Harold’s defeat at the Battle of Hastings, creating in us the certainty that mucking about with sharp things can only end in tears, and extending it into a blanket fearfulness of all manner of hazards, mechanical and human.

*There is good sociological evidence for this tendency — see Kate Fox’s hilarious book, Watching the English.