Editor's blog April 2007

An alarming piece of news: no more unpasteurised cheese in France. Health and safety have got to even the French. (At the same time, paradoxically, as fast food and ready meals are making similar inroads.)

This news comes in the same week as Britain announces that it will now, routinely, take and store fingerprints of the under 11’s and that an experiment with “speaking cctv” has been deemed such a success that these cameras will be installed across the UK: should you drop a piece of litter in your local town centre a little Hitler jobsworth in a booth the other side of town can activate your nearest cctv camera and bellow “Will the man in the grey suit pick up his McDonalds carton NOW”.

We started with the nanny state and now the nanny state is employing big brother. Some of us moved to France just to get away from these insults to our intelligence.

I love the fact that my boulanger wanders round his kitchen with a fag hanging from his lips and high maintenance women sit their dogs on their laps in French restaurants. Obviously not because I want croissant with ash or soup with dog hairs, any more than I want to catch salmonella or listeria or e-coli or whatever it is you get from untreated cheese.

And I hate people who drop litter, too. But I would rather people didn’t drop litter because they understand that it is a nasty, anti-social habit than because they are afraid of getting caught on camera.

If you sanitise life too thoroughly and enforce, rather than invite, social behaviour there is no need for people to educate themselves in order to make informed choices, to learn how and when to take risks; no need for anyone to develop a conscience as they are no longer asked to choose between good and bad behaviour. You create, in other words, a nation of imbeciles. A people no longer able to think for themselves. It is the end of risk, courage, bravery, change - human development.

OK, so we were only talking about a piece of cheese, but we anti-Utopianists need to be vigilant. However, just as moonshine Calvados is illegal but every other farm has a distillery, I am confident, this being France, that a nod and a wink will always lead us to comfortingly dangerous cheeses.