My own homely analogy to that is how, people’s lives, they accrue a host of lessons from things which have gone wrong. By an accumulation of all these little lessons is, older people generally become more cautious. This may also relate in some areas to their reduced capacity to make good any damage they suffer because of the deterioration of their bodies and their reduced capacity to work.

It’s not just people: it’s a practical way of learning which you can see, for example, in your pets. Not all of these lessons last, which is why we often repeat the same mistakes (eg: hangovers; indigestion; repeated relationship disasters). Another practical example is the loss of confidence if you have had a mishap driving a car. A certain degree of confidence is still necessary, so usually over time we steel ourselves to regain this confidence. (One person’s confidence is also another person’s foolhardiness!)

I too laughed at the litigation comment. But in combination with society’s obsession with risk avoidance it does create a problem.

My daughter’s school has recently installed increased security measures plus guards at considerable capital and on-going costs, costs that parents have to pay. This is but one of a series of measures over the last five years all designed to avoid risk.

As I walked around the school in the late afternoon last week looking for youngest daughter, I felt that it had become a much darker, more shadowed, unwelcoming place, effectively closing down much earlier in the day than it used to.

All these precautions don’t make me feel more secure. Instead, they make me worry about the risks that the school obviously feels are there. I also feel sorry for the girls, because it gives the school much greater powers of surveillance and control over them.

We’re trained from the start to check for snails in our ginger beer bottles… Maybe that’s why lawyers suffer from depression?

“Being a litigator, my first thoughts were of course about how everything could go wrong.”

Soooooo true! I laughed.