Health and safety should have gone mad

I share with many a concern that we are over-protective of children these days. Some people won't even let their children camp out in the back garden in case an evil lurker gets them. Statistically this is ludicrous. They are much more in danger every time you take them near a road. However, we shouldn't totally ignore risk either. I have to confess I did something with a group of teenagers many years ago that still gives me a cold shudder when I contemplate the dangers involved.

I had done some caving while at university, and when the youth club I helped run went on an adventure holiday (this was a few years later) I offered to lead a caving experience. This was straight caving, not potholing, I should stress. I picked three caves out of a guide (I think it was the one illustrated), all easy.

The first was very straightforward. A little narrow in places, but basically a straightforward walk into the hillside. The most exciting thing was getting there by car as it meant going up a 1 in 4 hill - the car really felt as if it was going to flip over backwards, most unnerving.

The second could only be accessed by walking up a stream bed, and had a stream running through it (very like the one on the book cover) for greater interest. But the third was the icing on the cake. It had two great caving experiences. After the entrance there was a crawl, sufficiently shallow that you had to have your arms ahead of you and your head on its side. It's really quite something when you are in contact with rock above and below in a person sandwich. After about 10 or 15 feet of crawl it opened up into a huge cavern - maybe 30 feet high and 100 feet wide - the contrast was stunning.

But access to this one was a pain. It involved a long trek from the nearest road, often with very little in the way of paths. To make it more interesting, when I did a recce beforehand, I discovered a shaft quite near the route. It was just a big hole in the ground, protected by walls maybe two feet high. I dropped a pebble down and counted about 5 seconds before it hit the ground. So I knew to keep my little band well away from this. However, on the first real visit with a group of teenagers I got lost.

I followed what I thought was the right route and ended up on a little path that seemed to be going the right way. Eventually, the destination was in sight - but I realized with horror that to get to it we would have to traverse a bit of path with a steep cliff on the left and a 100 foot+ drop on the right. At its narrowest, the path was about a foot wide, and was crumbly soil, sloping towards the chasm.

I should have backtracked - but it would have taken us about an hour to get back on the main track. I decided to take them along the path.

We made it - obviously - but when I look back it was just so dangerous, it scares me even now. Before I took the next group I made sure I had a safe route. But that stomach churning memory of that crumbly little path over the drop makes me realize - health and safety isn't always a bad thing.

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense

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