I blame the parents

The following bet is open to all except for big game hunters, David Attenborough, members of the circus community and Ninjas.


Picture the scene; you are walking home late at night all is quite and there is not soul in site, you take a shortcut across a car park, the car park is huge and completely flat, it takes a couple of minutes to make it half way across. Once in the middle of the car park you are suddenly faced with a great big hungry looking lion with a snarling growl and pointy teeth. If you ran as fast as you could it would take at least 30 seconds to reach the nearest thing that you could climb, the lion gets down into a crouch, the sort of crouch that suggest it is about to leap on you and tear you limb from limb. I bet you that you would be alarmed.

Picture, if you will, feeling this level of alarm and try to imagine what you would want in this situation. Perhaps a helicopter, or an elephant would help or at the very least someone to offer some advice on what to do in this situation. How would you feel if someone coming along and put a sticker reading “this person is alarmed” on your forehead? Whilst it could be said that the sticker would be factually accurate I can see no argument that would suggest the sticking of the sticker on the forehead was an action of any value whatsoever. If someone did this to you, and you somehow survived the encounter with the lion I would imagine that you would be very cross indeed with the stickeror. Such behaviour, you might well think, would be unacceptable. I would say that you would be right in considering such behaviour as unacceptable and so I just don’t understand why such behaviour is tolerated in our society. I witnessed just such an event today on the way to Tescos, someone had slapped a “This Door is Alarmed” sign on a door! How inconsiderate can you get?