The Very Safe Bridge

One of my favourite walks nearby is round Waterloo Lake in Roundhay Park. At one end it's very parky with flower beds and neat grass: at the other end it's a bit more woodlandy and wild.

However, I have always lived in fear of crossing the Dangerous Bridge at the far end. It was, until recently, just a wooden bridge with no railings around it or anything, above a stream that flowed into the lake. Imagine! No railings! You could have fallen over the edge into the boiling rapids below. Here they are:

Yes, that water must be six inches deep in places and some bits of it are very nearly moving.

So, to prevent a terrible accident, this is what they've done to the bridge:

Ironically, the lake, a former quarry, is extremely deep in the middle and many people have drowned trying to swim in it: most recently a teenage boy just a couple of years ago.

The point I'm trying to make is this. How can you make a whole park safe? Fence off the lake? With barbed wire on the top of the fence? You could put it at the bottoms of the trees too, to stop people climbing them.

What all this overmakingsafeness does is make people think that they don't need to think for themselves. And that leads to far more accidents.

Yes, I've said it before. Sorry. I'll probably say it again the next time I come across something equally daft. On the plus side, aren't the early autumn colours pretty?