What could possibly go wrong?

We are told that the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain that measures risk – is not fully developed until the age of 25.

This is apparently why teenagers are so vulnerable to making inappropriate connections on the internet, and disproportionately liable to die in car crashes.

It seems, on the face of it, a serious design misjudgement. Unless it was reckoned that there might be a shortage of volunteers for traditional high-risk youth activities such as warfare and childbirth if potential participants were equipped with a “Hang on a minute …” control.

The odd thing is that the Hanns are clearly exceptionally late developers in almost every respect. Hence I find myself living with a nappy-wearing toddler at an age when I should really be looking at compact retirement flats and glumly calculating how long it may be before I need to wear a nappy myself.

Yet a major part of the explanation for this is that I have always been preternaturally risk averse, and found that my brain was completely full long before I had completed the list of “what could possibly go wrong?” in the matters of marriage and having children.

It is interesting to observe my elder son, now four, following precisely the same path. His school has already had to invest in a padlock for one of its gates because young Hann was fretting so much about the risk of a little boy or girl running out into the road.

And it was seriously spooky to hear his howls of distress on Sunday as he begged his mother not to force him to go to his swimming class: an activity I similarly loathed with a passion.

He is very worried indeed about what might happen to him in the deep end, which strikes me as entirely reasonable.

In my first or second lesson at school I was knocked over in the shallow end by a boy called Shaun Corry, propelling himself smartly backwards in a tyre inner tube. My whole short life flashed before me as I began the process of drowning, and I have never since been able to enter a swimming pool with anything like equanimity.

After some discussion between us my wife gave in and was relieved to find that Charlie’s preferred alternative activity was a trip to a public baths, so he clearly has an aversion to a particular teacher rather than to the concept of swimming in general.

The only place in which our boy does not seem to be massively cautious is the car. His mother’s slow and careful driving provokes a constant back seat commentary. “Can you get past that truck for me, please, Mummy? Go on, you can do it!”

Having undermined her already fragile confidence on the road, he has now set himself up as a fashion critic, too. Dressing up for a rare night out recently, my wife made the silly mistake of asking Charlie whether he thought she looked nice. He shook his head.

“No, Mummy. For so many reasons.”

He then flung open her wardrobe door and said: “Let’s see what else we can find you!”

So that, ladies and gentlemen, is the prime achievement of my life to date. Producing a child who appears to be a weird amalgam of me, Sebastian Vettel and Gok Wan.

But mainly me, as he will find when he is pushing 60 and similarly regrets that there are so few photographs of his early years, because he has the same resolute aversion to the camera that I felt at his age.

It has taken me decades to get over it, and I still much prefer to be behind the camera rather than the subject of a photograph.

As for moving pictures – well, I successfully evaded those for a lifetime until a TV crew started following me round and I felt that it might be a career-ending move to tell them to clear off (though I did drop a number of hints).

Luckily Charlie hasn’t seen my appearances, which he would no doubt regard as letting the side down. 

“Daddy on the TV? Don’t be silly, Mummy!” was absolutely his last word on the subject.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

My new alarm may not deter burglars, but it certainly scares me

For a man whose default setting is one of constant concern about “what could possibly go wrong”, I reckon that I take a reasonably phlegmatic approach to the everyday risks of accident, fire and theft.

Back in 1988, when I moved into my current house, I remember asking the splendidly unflappable John Woodford, who had overseen its restoration, whether I should be concerned about the fact that the nearest fire hydrant was a couple of miles away.

“No,” he replied. “Because by the time a fire engine gets out here they won’t be able to do anything apart from damp down the ruins. The trick is not to set fire to it in the first place.”

Similarly, when an insurance company insisted a few years ago that I must fit window locks, and I commissioned the great and sadly late Len Gregory’s firm to carry out the work, he made it very clear that I was wasting my money. “If somebody really wants to get in, they’ll get in,” he opined, outlining a range of possibilities that I suppose it would be imprudent to repeat in print.

So it was a bleak day for me last December when an insurance assessor pitched up at my home in what I blithely imagined was a peaceful rural backwater. Because he spotted right away that it actually represented a bigger risk than an inner city terraced house sandwiched between a hostel for allegedly reformed arsonists and a pub noted for late-night binge drinking and the circulation of Class A drugs.

My house: an insurance assessor's view

In consequence, I am now the reluctant possessor of something I never wanted: a burglar alarm. I have no idea what these things do to burglars, but it scares the proverbial out of me every time the warning siren blares as I enter the house. While leaving home has become a nightmare, given that I am one of those people who always likes to pop back at least three times for the vital things they have left behind.

I have had to distribute sets of spare keys to kindly neighbours, as required by the police, vaguely wondering how doubling the number of keys in circulation actually makes my property more secure.

And far from enabling me to sleep easier at night, I am now lying awake worrying about how long it will be before the wretched thing goes off because of a passing mouse or moth catching one of the system’s many electronic eyes.

I would have much preferred to give the insurance industry its marching orders. However, one downside of living in a listed building is the hypothetical risk of a disaster that could land me with a bill for twice the property’s market value in order to reinstate it to the satisfaction of English Heritage. As a “what could possibly go wrong” man, I could not bear to take that risk.

At least twice a week I witness the normally placid Mrs Hann suffer a meltdown as yet another website refuses her order, or one of her credit cards is cancelled, because she cannot remember her password or PIN.

Between you and me, I am not sure that this is because she has religiously followed the official advice to use a completely different password for every site, a different PIN for every card, and never, ever to write any of them down. Frankly I don’t see how anyone, with the possible exception of Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man, could ever comply.

“I bet a fraudster wouldn’t have this trouble!” I hear my wife cry, and of course she is absolutely right. I am under no illusions that my new alarm will be the slightest practical use, either. I just hope that it does not disturb my neighbours or their livestock. And, if it does, please accept this apology and know that the risk-averse insurance industry is entirely to blame.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Remember, it is far better to arrive late than not at all

Of all the many causes of delays on our overburdened motorway system, surely none is more maddening than the long, stop-start crawl that turns out to be due to drivers slowing down to have a good gawp at some mishap in the opposite carriageway.

Accidents clearly have a horrible fascination for many of us. Although one of the many things I learned over the weekend is that we must now refer to them as “incidents”, because “accident” implies an absence of blame that may well not be the case.

Friday's serious incident on the M5

Yet, having taken a leisurely look at the wreckage, we seem to absorb remarkably few lessons. Motorway traffic soon returns to its customary but illegal 80mph and the bad habits of tailgating, undertaking, using hand-held mobile phones and ignoring electronic warning signs all continue exactly as before.

Perhaps that is why the bright idea of leaving crashed cars by the side of the road as a dreadful warning to others never seems to have caught on in the UK.

Now, I make no claims to be a particularly virtuous driver. But my bad habits are certainly moderated by having been tangentially involved in two multiple pile-ups: one on the M62 and the other on the central motorway in Newcastle.

In both cases I crested a rise to find stationary traffic in front of me, and stopped safely, if not without difficulty. Many vehicles behind me did not. In Newcastle I was driving a literally brand new Land Rover, fresh from the showroom, and will be forever grateful to the driver of the large van immediately behind who, as the multiple impacts shunted him forwards, manfully steered away from the rear of my car. I was able to drive away without a scratch.

As, in both incidents, were the individuals at the front of all the chaos who were observed calmly restarting their cars and leaving the scene, without bothering to hang around to help the police with their enquiries.

Whenever I feel tempted to take risks on the road, I call to mind the image of the blue BMW I watched in my rear view mirror as it became airborne and executed a perfect barrel roll, wondering whether its final resting place was going to be on top of me.

Although both these crashes are still seared on my memory many years later, they were deemed far too ordinary to merit any coverage in even the local media, which I duly scoured for reports. I deduced from this that no one must have been killed despite the large number of vehicles involved.

Though this might be an assumption too far, since the rule of thumb seems to be that it requires several fatalities in a road crash to merit a small fraction of the column inches lavished on a single death on the railway.

I have never understood this. Rail travel is inherently safe, and there is nothing any passenger can do to make it safer. Driving, while rendered much less dangerous over the years by improvements in car and road design, remains a far riskier business than catching a train, and responsibility rests squarely with all of us who get behind a steering wheel.

This seems to me a pretty good reason for giving more publicity to road crashes, and their causes. And, yes, if the bereaved families can bear it, to the “human interest” stories of the lives they have cut short.

Because every one of us who drives a car will surely benefit from a regular reminder that we are piloting something potentially lethal, and that it is ultimately our responsibility to ensure that we are equipped to handle the unexpected, whether that be a bank of smoke, a falling tree, or an animal or child dashing out into the road.

Yes, delays are frustrating, sometimes infuriating. I find that the best recipe for calm is to keep reminding myself that life is already very short and that it is far, far better to arrive late than never to arrive at all.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Risk and elitism in the firing line

All-out war continues, not just in Afghanistan, but against domestic enemies as diverse as risk, elitism, racism, sexism, obesity and drunkenness. Almost the complete range of my interests and enthusiasms, in fact.

I was powerfully reminded of the campaign to eliminate risk by a report on Saturday that no fewer than nine fire engines had raced to Newcastle’s Mansion House so that firefighters (not, God forbid, firemen) in gas-tight suits could deal with a deadly seepage of mercury from an antique clock.

Forty years ago, just across Osborne Road at the Royal Grammar School, my schoolmates and I regularly amused ourselves by shunting globules of mercury around the railway lines carved in the ancient desks of the science department by previous generations of bored youths. Clearly we are lucky to be alive.

I returned to the school on Friday, in response to a kind invitation to lunch from its governors, and found that the passage of time had not erased a feeling of mild foreboding on entering the premises.

I arrived on the dot of 12.30 to avoid the risk of being slammed in late detention, carefully checked that my tie and trousers were properly fastened, and felt vaguely guilty that I was not wearing a crested blue cap.

Perhaps it is because the place has undergone such a comprehensive physical transformation since I left in 1971 that I feel strongly tempted to send my own son there, when he reaches the appropriate age in around 2017. All I will need is a full-time job in the North East paying enough to cover the fees, with a minimum retirement age of 75. All offers gratefully received.

My own parents faced no comparable concerns, because I enjoyed a Northumberland County Council scholarship; one of those devices designed to promote social mobility (still very good, apparently) but abolished because they were also redolent of elitism (now thoroughly bad).

On Sunday, my wife and I found another front opened in the war against risk at the church where we were married, which had been transformed into a building site. Contractors were busily levelling the floor, which had served perfectly well for two or three hundred years, because Elfin Safety now deemed it to pose an unacceptable “trip hazard”.

Later that day, I found myself in a restaurant opposite a man who shockingly observed of the passers-by “There are a lot of foreigners around here.” Ordinarily this would have been the cue for a visit from the diversity awareness police, but it merely raised a slightly puzzled laugh because the speaker was my Iranian father-in-law. A man so comprehensively assimilated that he answers the question of whether he prefers to be known as Iranian or Persian with “Actually, I prefer to be called British.”

I did not dare to ask how he felt about the news that the BNP was now prepared to admit (“welcome” might be pushing it, I guess) ethnic minority members. But I was interested to find that my wife’s uncle thoroughly approved of some distinctly non-PC remarks I had posted on my blog about that Iranian “criminal in uniform” Ali Dizaei, who rose almost to the top of the Metropolitan Police by relentlessly playing the “racism” card against anyone who stood in his way, and somehow became president of the Black Police Association despite what many might have seen as the fatal handicap of not being the least bit black.

This Persian feast was not quite the romantic meal à deux I had envisaged for my first Valentine’s Day as a married man, but it certainly beat the previous 40 years of moodily chewing a TV dinner for one, and regretting the lack of mawkish greetings cards on my mantelpiece.

Yes, even I am prepared to concede that, once in while, some things do change for the better.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.