Hockey and hanging baskets count as risks, but now we have a real one

Risk assessment is the mantra of our time. You cannot organise a girls’ school hockey match without having to assess the risk that the combatants will bark their knuckles. The baskets of flowers that used to hang outside the Ring of Bells pub in Norton Fitzwarren have been assessed as a risk to passers-by who, if they were more than eight feet tall, might have to step into the road or bump their heads. Trustees of charities and pension funds must assess their risks or take the consequences. Much good all this did for us on the day when City and suburban life developed a new kind of hazard: the risk of being blown up on the way to work. The markets had to assess it and, in their own way, they did. They stumbled but picked themselves up, and by this week they were moving ahead. No doubt they were telling us that risks like these had been priced in.