Look Who's Talking by Colin Baker: PC emperor is naked and peeling

IT is five years ago today that my first column appeared in this august (or should that be July?) weekly.

To those of you who have taken the trouble to follow me all the way from the froth and fun of Freetime, (tucked tantalisingly in the motor section), to the dangerous cutting edge of journalism on this page, I say thank you and welcome. To anyone who was hoping to find the wise words of Arthur Church in this, his usual space in the paper, I apologise for any disappointment and hope that you will find my musings, ramblings, diatribes and rants go some way to filling the gap that his retirement has undoubtedly left.

Elsewhere in this paper you will see a photograph of a visit I made this week to Hughenden First School, where I met the children of year two, who apparently thought my King Rat at the Wycombe Swan last Christmas was 'well bad', although one young stalwart asserted that I wasn't that scary when I was on my own without my rats to back me up, so there! For the purposes of the photograph I put my arms around several children to gather them in for the camera. Then, the following day, I read in the paper that a lollipop man in Kent, who is so popular with the children that they all line up to slap palms with him and do 'high fives', has been told by Kent County Council to stop the practice, as any physical contact with the children is forbidden under council regulations.

Political correctness and fear of opportunist legal action are making us all afraid of our own shadows.

However good the Samaritan might be, today he would check the EC Code of Practice on Administering Care and Unguents to Strangers in a Public Place (Para 2a (iv) Appendix J, before helping anyone who had been set upon by thieves. Even then he would probably get into trouble for using cotton wool to bathe his wounds or when the removal of plasters pulled all the victim's hairs off.

I heard that there was genuine concern at a local school, this week, over the advisability of removing a splinter from a child's foot, even though it was protruding from the boy's sole. At a recent Health and Safety training session, a teacher had been warned of the possible legal ramifications of any form of physical intervention, in the event, I presume, of a politically incorrect alien life form entering the resultant hole in the lad's foot and turning him into something from the X-Files.

A nine-year-old boy in Virginia was charged with aggravated sexual battery, handcuffed and finger-printed for brushing past a girl in the school cafeteria. Of the many imports from America, the paralysis and fear created by deranged or greedy litigation are even less welcome than The Jerry Springer Show, films that show Americans winning the battle of Agincourt and Mike Tyson.

In New Jersey recently, a six-year-old boy was forbidden to hand out party invitations to his friends, who were all male, because the school principal deemed it sexist and discriminatory.

Those of us who have not had a common sense bypass can only keep shouting that the emperor is not only naked but his skin is peeling off too - and hope that sanity is restored before we all retire to our politically impregnable individual survival pods.