Poppycock

Spend the morning in the Bay View shopping centre in Colwyn Bay, helping the British Legion sell poppies.

The public are very generous and I enjoy speaking to the ex-servicemen and women, who give up so much of their time collecting for the Poppy Appeal every November.

I am told by Arthur, one of the sellers, that health and safety regulations mean that I must not help buyers of poppies with their pins: I might injure them and the Legion would be sued. I am incredulous; these people have risked their lives for their country, yet are now inhibited from helping people fix their poppies to their lapels by an overweening, meddling bureaucracy.

I am half minded to tell them to ignore these petty diktats; no court in the land would award damages against a poppy seller collecting for the Legion on Armistice Day. But I bite my tongue; the compensation culture has become such a depressingly corrosive feature of life in this country that I really can’t be sure.