Here I am in Spain spending time with my little boys and taking in the occasional cultural event. Last night, I attended the opening night of the Lanjarón ‘Fiesta de Agua y Jamon’ (festival of water and ham).

Lanjarón is a town of about 4,000 inhabitants in the Sierra Nevada area of Andalusia, and it’s famed for its pure water, which is bottled and sold throughout Spain. The town likes to celebrate the abundance of ‘agua’, derived from the snow melt coming down from the mountains. Once a year on the night of 23 June, to coincide with the festival of ‘San Juan’, it stages a mass public water fight. At the stroke of midnight, out come the municipal fire hoses and everybody who is standing in the street is sprayed down.

The water fight attracts a couple of thousand people generally aged about 15 to 50. The event is unsuitable for the very young, the old or the fragile: elderly family members and those who dislike getting wet tend to stay inside and watch through the windows, which have been sealed to avoid ‘mucho agua’ getting into the property concerned.

There’s never any trouble: shiny, happy people progress through the streets spraying giant water pistols, chucking buckets of water each over other’s heads and chanting “ole ole ole ole – much agua, mucho agua”.

Can you imagine an event of this nature happening in Britain or, perhaps, in Brighton and Hove? It would never be allowed. For starters, the city council would be terrified about members of the public filing injury lawsuits because they slipped on the pavement or suffered “post traumatic stress syndrome” after being washed down with a municipal fire hose. Store holders would object and request compensation because they had to spend an hour sealing their windows and doors.

In Britain, the event would never, ever pass a risk assessment. If schoolchildren are no longer allowed to paddle in the sea on school trips because it’s deemed too “high risk”, adults who’ve consumed a few alcoholic beverages certainly wouldn’t be allowed to throw water over themselves and on to a wet road. And I have a strong suspicion that riot police would be required to break up a profusion of drunken fights. Event-goers would be sick on the pavement and urinate in side streets. A huge clean-up operation would be required to remove broken glass. Someone would beat up the man from the discount store because their £1 water pistol (made in China) failed to work.

It is refreshing to witness a large-scale public event that involves almost zero police presence, youths getting on together, no fighting, no visible drunkenness, no arrests and without anybody ranting on about Health and Safety rules. Britain has a whole lot to offer in terms of summer events (Glastonbury Festival and Wimbledon, for example) but the obsession with ridiculous risk assessments and the fear of litigation over incidents as mundane as a branch falling off a tree and hitting a member of the public (yes, this really did happen in a London borough!), has long gone out of control and serves to limit people’s fun.

I think it’s a shame that we wouldn’t be able to have a mass summer water fight on, perhaps, Marine Parade... imagine the spectacle!