Twisting by the pool

French health and safety laws almost killed me last week. They are supposed to prevent children from drowning in swimming pools; they almost saw me skewered by flying aluminium poles.

This is the law of unintended consequences: French legislation to save toddlers from a watery demise nearly resulted in a strange and unusual disaster. At the moment when it seemed briefly possible I was about to breathe my last, my whole life did not flash before my eyes.

The only thought to enter my mind was: "Tourist in bizarre holiday tragedy."

In France, every swimming pool, public or private, must be fenced in, covered over or otherwise protected. This is to stop small children drowning. It's happened before. They don't want it to happen again.

So the French introduced a law to protect the health and safety of their toddlers. So when we reach our holiday villa in the middle of nowhere in the south of France, we are confronted by a pool covered by a great plastic sheet ribbed at regular intervals by aluminium poles.

To go swimming, we have to uncover the pool. The covering sheet is held down by straps attached to the wooden decking. They resemble nothing so much as the garters which hold up a pair of stockings (or so I am told).

To uncover the pool, you have to undo the garters and wind up the plastic sheet and the poles. It's hard work and takes about 20 minutes. It's worth it on a hot day.

The first thing you do when you finally finish is leap into the water to cool down. However, we are in a very windy part of France and, as we all know, the weather this summer is unpredictable.

In northern Languedoc, between Narbonne and Carcassonne, it's been warm but cloudy. And very, very windy. It's so windy you don't realise how hot it is. We were in a villa belonging to a friend of a friend.

It's at the top of a steep and windy hill overlooking a vast expanse of mountain and rock. It is very windy. So windy the biggest industry in the area seems to be wind farms.

Even so, we didn't realise the wind was scary enough to whip up the plastic sheet over the swimming pool and send the aluminium poles flying into the air. But as we undid the garters prior to uncovering the pool, the entire sheet reared up like some alien monster and started kicking and whipping in the wild wind.

The aluminium poles suddenly turned from light, easy-to-lift supports, into airborne spears threatening to nail me to the ground. The sheet and the poles flew towards me on a heavy gust of wind and for a moment I really did think my last sight on earth was a plastic "Jaws" about to devour me.

At the very least, I thought I'll be spending the next few weeks getting an in-depth view of the French health system. Luckily, the wind died as quickly as it came.

The dangerous sheet of plastic and the killer aluminium flopped harmlessly into the swimming pool leaving us only with the problem of how to retrieve it again.

It turns out that the need to prevent unsupervised toddlers from drowning is taken very seriously by the Government of France but it's not given quite the same priority by the people themselves.

According to a Brit who makes his living looking after swimming pools in the area (the "proper man" my wife insisted on calling in after our calamity), 95 per cent of them stay uncovered day and night. People have to buy the equipment but they can't be bothered with the rigmarole of trying to make it work. Some pools don't need covering.

They're protected by sophisticated electronic sensors which raise the alarm if some unauthorised child falls in. Or some unauthorised rodent. Or leaf. Or if there is a power cut. Or for any one of a dozen other reasons.

Which is why everyone who has invested in such a system leaves it turned off in exactly the same way as those who are supposed to leave their pools covered actually keep them uncovered. A

s for the family which invested in any expensive five-piece domed affair to cover their pool, they never got beyond square one. A gust of wind caught them unawares as they were fitting it for the first time.

Bits of heavy plastic flew in all directions, ripping a hole in the roof and smashing into one of their parked cars.

Clearly the law is any ass. If you want to stop children drowning in swimming pools, the simplest solution would be to supervise them properly.

Yet in the world of health and safety - in this country as much as in France - politicians seem to think they can save us from ourselves with more rules and regulations.

In truth, all they ever do is allow us to invent new ways of demonstrating our stupidity. Like trying to remove a swimming pool cover in a heavy wind.