Last night I watched some catch-up, including a programme about the dangers of the postwar house, which included a man doing some work on his houseboat with an electric drill below the water line; kitchen kettles which when boiled would thoughtfully eject their electric leads straight into your washing-up water; and the perils of gas boilers in inadequately ventilated bathrooms. In order to demonstrate the silent, tasteless, odourless dangers of carbon monoxide, a glass box was produced. Momentarily I wondered if Schrödinger’s Cat was going to put in an appearance – I’d love to see that experiment - but no, that was neither here nor there, and instead the presenter made do with an electronic monitor that beeped timidly. Disappointment all round. Nevertheless, the 1950s fondness for DIY apparently resulted in all manner of unpleasant amputations, electrocutions, falls, bangs on the head, and other unexpected and frequently lethal weekend occurrences. It may have also explained why our garden shed used to wobble if the breeze got up.
Even more amusing was the part of the programme dealing with home chemistry experiments. This was something with which I could identify. Like most boys with a scientific bent, or certainly with some bent scientific tendencies, I had a Lotts chemistry set supplemented with items nicked from the school chemistry lab, or purchased legitimately from the local pharmacy, and in my case, obtained by my father who had access to chemicals used in photography and printing. Despite several years’ intimacy – some of it condoned by school - with wonderfully dangerous materials like elemental mercury, sodium chlorate, conc nitric acid, benzene, potassium nitrate, uranium oxide, and any amount of beautiful blue copper sulphate crystals, I’m still around to laugh at the sort of shock-horror media types who regard anything that sounds vaguely chemical as being firmly in skull and crossbones territory. “Acid”. “Poison”. “Explosive”. “Nasty smell”. Ooh, I’ll have to sit down for a minute. Nurse, nurse ! When I hear that 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate have gone up I sort of smirk knowingly, while suppressing uncharitable thoughts about missed opportunities. This isn’t callousness in the face of mass casualties, it’s a nodding acknowledgement of an old friend. I hadn’t thought about ammonium nitrate for years.
Having smugly survived, consequently I’m proud to be a member of that generation that treats “Elf and Safety” with a degree of disrespect. Especially when concern extends inappropriately, crossing over into the drear realm populated by snowflakes and the feeble minded. Some years ago we were on the glorious flat-topped summit of Golden Cap, Dorset, at 627 feet the highest point on the south coast. Close by were a mother and father and two children, whose brayings suggesting they might have been members of the Profoundly-Dymme family, resident towards the southern end of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The mother was squealing that it was dangerous, that it was a long way down, there was a bit of fence missing, children could fall off, there weren’t enough notices, she was going to write to somebody, she was going to sue, etc etc. I think she mentioned the United Nations. We gave her a suitable glaring at.
Recently we read about an evidently similar episode in Snowdonia, an area quite well known for being mountainous - itself a description which tends to imply abrupt transitions in altitude. A year or two ago we read of a group of adults drowning in the sea, not so much because they couldn’t swim, but because they had never made the hypothetical association that connects deep water with drowning. Many similar examples could be cited. Whenever some juvenile - glued to their dim-phone, head wrapped in earphones listening to some crap apology for music - walks in front of a train, you can be sure that it will be the rail company that gets blamed for having their trains in the wrong place, going too fast, without signs on them saying “train – keep off”, and inadequately protected from the body-part-spattering embraces of total idiots who – and whose parents – know their rights. Of course I want children - and everyone else - to be safe, but many dangerous situations are only dangerous if you deliberately get into them against all reason.
Attitude to risk is complex. One is tempted to generalise that the people who have a problem with the fundamental qualities of terrain and the irresistible forces of physics and biology are the same ones who flout common sense when it comes to protecting the wider population from coronavirus, and whose actions further delay the end of the crisis and add to the toll of misery. These may also be the same ones who think that the re-opening of nail parlours is a must-have major leap towards the restoration of the UK economy (and who, sadly, may be right) and that a couple of days swilling lager by the Med justifies anything.
Generalisations aren’t always fair, but then neither is life. Every member of every generation is subjected to the innate hazards of life on our small planet, plus some novel ones specific to time and place, and it adopts a spectrum of attitudes accordingly, though unpredictably so.
Hence the title of this piece. Potassium ferricyanide never did me any harm, but that was mainly because I didn’t do anything stupid with it. I was humorously aware that the “cyanide” part of the name terrified elderly relatives, while being a mere whimsicality of chemical nomenclature. It’s not a completely innocuous substance, however, but I didn’t try to eat it or inhale it or stuff it into unreceptive orifices – either my own, or those belonging to next-door-but-one’s cat. No, what I did was this. I found an old Quink bottle (the sort that would sit on one’s school desk) and washed it out thoroughly. I took it to a local beauty spot called Tinker’s Dale, where I had noticed that the banks of the stream were a reddish colour. There I filled the empty ink bottle with stream water and took it back to base. I then dropped in a few tiny orangey-red crystals of potassium ferricyanide, K3Fe(CN)6, and observed the sudden deep blue flush, a colour similar to Prussian Blue. Thus I confirmed the presence of iron in the water. Scientific curiosity encouraged, no risk taken, no harm done. Healthy and safe.
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