Underage II

I realise I’ve ranted about this before, but I make no excuses for it, and I’ll do it again if the opportunity arises. Just look at this:

Yes, the sticker says “25″ with a line through it, and “Are you old enough?”. And yes, it’s a child’s cutlery set, with a knife you’d be hard pushed to slice off a piece of ripe brie with, let alone stab a rival gang member in a dark alley. Let’s have a look at the back:

“Cutlery to be sold to those aged 18 and over only.” What kind of madness is this? And while we’re at it, how about “Cutlery set only suitable for children over 3 years”? Jake is less than half that age, and he finds it perfectly suitable, thank you very much. Is he supposed to wait until his third birthday so I can present them to him in a coming-of-age style ritual? “Son, the time has come for you to cast aside your childish plastic spoon and, like a man, go forth and use this miniature fork emblazoned with a cartoon cow. Oh, and also this blunt knife which you may, if you press hard enough, be able to slice your yoghurt with.”

Since I’m probably already attracting the attention of Social Services by letting a one year old use a fork, I might as well take the opportunity to have another offence taken into account – Mia, age 4, has been using a proper real-life 8 inch kitchen knife for chopping vegetables. For years. Never unsupervised, to be fair, but the level of supervision required is very minor these days, on account of the fact that she’s so good at it.

Apart from vegetable chopping being an important skill (especially for a child that’s mad about cooking) and good because it allows her to actually make a useful contribution, it also means she understands and respects knives for what they are and knows how to handle them safely. If or when, during her childhood, she gets hold of one that she wasn’t supposed to get hold of, it won’t be a problem. I think that’s a far healthier situation than turning them into some kind of mystical forbidden fruit. Having said that, it maybe depends on the child. I can certainly think of other children the same age I wouldn’t trust with one for 5 seconds.

Anyway, I’ve been sidetracked again. I was ranting. It may seem a bit extreme to get worked up about some stupid restrictions on purchasing toddler cutlery, even if they are, by anyone’s standards, REALLY stupid. But it’s not really about that – it’s just that these things are symptomatic of the awful authoritarian nanny state that’s closing in around us every day. You can’t move for rules, regulations, licenses and inspectors any more. Ban this. Ban that. Don’t do this. Don’t eat that. And whatever you do, don’t run in the pancake race.

The picture on the right (thanks to Dick Puddlecote for finding it), incredibly from 1929, portrays a shockingly accurate picture of modern-day Britain, although to be perfect some of the inspectors should be hiding behind CCTV cameras. Oh, and of course, they said “all round” the home, but Ed Balls and his cronies want to send them in too. Not that this is a party political broadcast, since the only alternative to the current mob of meddling social engineers is another lot wearing a different coloured rosette. Very much a preferable lot at this point in time, but hardly much better on the scale of things. It seems to me like the only way to free ourselves from the ever expanding claws of the oppressive state is full scale revolution. As that seems highly improbable, I try to ignore the important things and focus on children’s cutlery.