Playing with Dragons

According to The Times, a rural hamlet in Monmouthshire has lost its Royal Mail deliveries following a Health and Safety assessment of the route. As somebody who is not affected by the application of the report, it is hilarious reading. It seems that every road and uneven surface threatens grazes, broken limbs or death. If you didn’t know this was someone’s job to think in that way, you might suspect that the author of the report harboured a deeply distressing personal pathology, seeing disaster lurking behind every sunbeam and pebble.

The logical extension of almost anything seemed to be a potential risk of death. This was precisely why I felt unable to complete the Health and Safety assessment that I was instructed to fill out if I wanted to run a Laughter in the Park event. I could contrive to see the potential for disaster everywhere, but I had not idea at all about how to quantify or characterise the risk. I knew it was possible that someone might fall into the rill, or fall down the bandstand steps, but I have no idea how likely either or those events would be. Almost inevitable or as plausible as death rays from Mars?

I was thinking of this today when I was watching the celebrations of the Chinese New Year. Local groups staged an exhibition of drumming and dancing dragons. The dragons leapt about, clambered on walls and chased delighted children up and down steps and through the Water Gardens. The young men inside the dragons played with the children and members of the crowds. They stood on shoulders to rear up and take down red envelopes and to hang lucky scrolls.

Laughter in the Park

At the end of my Sunday stroll I dropped in on a Social Entrepreneur who runs the cafe in the local park. We had an interesting chat between the times when he was cleaning around and serving his customers.

I was delighted to be offered the cafe as a venue for running future Laughter in the Park sessions. I’m very pleased about this as I have previously attended and enjoyed laughter sessions in Regent’s Park and other similar venues in London that offer a suitable bandstand. Although we have a bandstand in Harlow it is not in suitable condition for use by the general public and has the added (albeit picturesque) disadvantage of having a rill running very close to it. The last time that I enquired about using the bandstand for a voluntary event I was instructed to put together a Health and Safety Risk assessment. Now, that’a pretty much like telling me to look at a bare field and assess its crop potential. I have no background in agronomics or Health And Safety and any assessment that I made would have been pure guesswork rather than based on informed principles. So, the planned Laughter in the Park events didn’t happen.

The events will need to be scheduled for times when the cafe is not in use so that will affect the audience that can attend. I’d like to think that young people could attend but homework and other obligations would probably preclude family events for weekday evenings. I’m going to think some more about what I can offer on weekdays evenings or at weekends and with what sort of regularity.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project