I’ve remembered what I forgot earlier.

Michael Marshall Smith is also guest blogger this week on Powells.com.

“Now, there are certain combinations of words that just work, conjuring something beautiful and true and pure: like ‘peace and harmony’, ‘second-hand bookstore’ and ‘all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet’. ‘Health and safety’, on the other hand, is a phrase that makes me want to bite people. It’s always used as if it needs no qualification, but was found carved into a rock discovered well below the carboniferous layer. ‘It’s health and safety’, people intone: not adding ‘regulations’, or prefixing with ‘in the interests of…’ — but rather as if they are evoking an irrevocable property of the universe, like thunder or gravity or death. Though ‘health and safety’ is of course a good thing, it often seems to be used more as a way of stopping people from doing something that might otherwise be convenient or intuitively reasonable. But I suppose that not subjecting potential customers to danger of death is a boon, overall, so that’s the current battle in the overall struggle to bring natural health, beauty and contemporary health medicine to a yearning public.”

Originally from her divine shadow on August 21, 2007, 3:57pm