Snide remark? Moi? Mistaken identity I assure you, guv. I began in fire safety in 1975. I will have done 30 years later this month. Philllllip will be organizing a party to present me with a clock in the mess at Moreton. i do not recall anyone as good looking and full of sex appeal as me hogging the journals. You are right as to where the complaints about inconsistence and inflexibility came from. What the complainants did not appreciate was that the concepts of flexibility and consistency are mutually exclusive to a degree. Alas, there were just too many reading and reiterating the words without a good understanding of the philosophy behind them. And though we clearly will not, and need not, agree on this point, even though we seem to be largely in agreement, a lot was due to the fact that they were trained not educated, in much the same way as graduates from fire engineering degrees are educated but not trained. The two things are different. The sad thing is that flexibility was growing in any case, and so prescription could possibly have remained with a new generation of more flexible guys applying it intelligently. But one still meets the people, and as I have said many times on these boards, now much more rarely, who can only read words. I gave an example on the boards just recently of a F&RS requiring emergency escape lighting in hotel bathrooms. Why? Because sure enough the BS and the AD call for EL in windowless toilets. So, the BS is about to be amended now to say that it does not mean en suite bathrooms in hotel bedrooms. But would such an amendment have been necessary if inflexible reading of words was not still alive and kicking and simply giving ammunition to those who want definitve guidance killed off.
