“I’m Alright Jack” – no, it’s all wrong (From The Argus)

“I’m Alright Jack” – no, it’s all wrong

3:56pm Tuesday 25th May 2010

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By Jo Chipchase - Letting off steam »

At present, I’m enjoying a Spanish break with my two little boys. At the weekend, we visited the beach at Torre del Mar. I was carrying my youngest son when my eldest – who was wandering behind me - removed his sandals, walked on the hot pebbles and started wailing. Immediately, a Spanish lady leapt up, checked his feet and helped him over the stones. She was genuinely concerned. This isn’t an isolated incident: sometimes, Spanish ladies will approach English mums and say that the kids need to be wearing more or fewer clothes because they’ll be too hot / too cold, etc. Sometimes, the locals might be making an unnecessary fuss (for example, after being used to the English climate, our kids are unlikely to feel cold in a t-shirt when it’s 20 degrees) but at least these individuals care and choose to be good Samaritans.

After reading the English news today, on reflection, I’m thankful for this ‘friendly interference’. When you’re distant from a situation or place – such as Britain – it’s easy to see it from a different perspective to the one we generally adopt at home. And the community spirit and family focus here in Spain are in sharp contrast to the scenario in Britain where health and safety rules dictate ‘acceptable risk’ but people appear to have lost their application of commonsense and decent behaviour towards others. Furthermore, people are fearful of “getting involved” – even when the outcome could prove tragic.

Take, for example, the case of the five month old baby left to burn on Brighton beach in this weekend’s heat wave. Bearing in mind the beach was so crowded that people could barely see a pebble underneath the thousands of reddening limbs, did nobody spot that a tiny baby was in direct sunlight without any form of covering and was suffering? Blinded by bright light and the need to keep oneself to oneself, no doubt, the fellow sunbathers failed to tell Mum that she was making a dangerous error - until Police Community Support Officers turned up on the scene and saved the day. I would wager that if the same thing had happened on a crowded Spanish beach, the Spanish onlookers would have intervened before hospitalisation was required. Perhaps Mum would have, err, benefited from someone pointing out her stupid mistake – i.e. before the police and social services became involved. Sometimes, friendly interference can be a godsend.

And, according to today’s news, in Peterborough passersby left a dying man gasping on the pavement for two hours with his shopping strewn around him because they assumed – wrongly – that he was drunk. In fact, he had earlier complained of chest pains and requested help that clearly didn’t materialise. In the end, someone made the effort to check the man properly and called 999 but it was too late: he was already dead. It makes me wonder... if an attractive 20-something female was lying on the pavement in broad daylight, would everybody assume that she was drunk and let her die unaided? I suspect the answer is “no” so why do we pick and choose who we help? Even if the passersby didn’t want to become personally involved, surely it wouldn’t be too much trouble to call 999 from a mobile phone before walking away.

I remember once leaving the lingerie department of a department store in Brighton because a woman was ignoring the screams of her newborn baby, which clearly wanted feeding. Instead, she chose to stroll around for 20 minutes viewing bras and trying them on in the changing room. At the time, I didn’t want to ‘interfere’ but I could no longer stand the desperate wailing. I wondered for a while afterwards: should I have tapped her on the shoulder and said “he’s hungry” rather than walking away? What was more important: that Mum might have rebuffed me or the fact that the baby was distressed? If I was wrong and he was just “a screamer”, what harm would I have done by commenting? Perhaps she was in a daze caused by sleep deprivation and would have appreciated my advice. This sort of ‘laissez faire’ thinking reminds me of how the Baby P case was allowed to happen – i.e. people in the local community could surely hear and see a problem but they blanked it out and took no action.

And we might not want to “get involved” but we certainly know how to set health and safety regulations that dictate how people must deal with others, instead of applying sensible standards of decency and empathy. Back in 2008, I remember a friendly Brighton taxi driver telling me that he was no longer allowed to assist an elderly, disabled passenger up the steps to her house because of health and safety rules that demand “no physical contact”. The result was: the lady was left to struggle while the driver sat watching and disliking the situation. There’s nothing right about that, Jack.

When I was young, my Mum used to say “they should do something about it”, as if a mysterious band of people – the faceless ‘they’ - would put the world’s rights to wrong. I’m not advocating approaching groups of knife-wielding youths or drunks in the street and waving a finger at them. But, actually, if you see that something is seriously wrong with a person, why expect to run away, pass the buck and hide behind the net curtains while another individual sorts it out? Is it a simple case of “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” that we’ve forgotten: certainly, none of us would like to be left dying on a pavement or burning on a beach but that’s clearly what we’re in for these days. Perhaps we should stop copping out and ‘do something about it’ ourselves before Britain becomes even more of a ‘broken’ place to live?