Patrick Christys: I don't want to live in a world of trigger warnings on Shakespeare

The world’s going mad, in fact, I’m not sure I’m even actually allowed to say the word mad anymore.

Two stories broke today that made me put my own fist in my mouth and bite down on it so hard I nearly drew blood.

Firstly, there are going to be trigger warnings at performances of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at The Globe theatre. Yes, it’s bard news for Shakespeare fans as audiences will be alerted to the fact the show includes fake blood, drug use, moments of violence and suicide. I hope there’s no spoilers in there for anyone, after all it is a new release and you might not have had time to see it for yourself yet.

I think this is deeply patronising for people. We can’t over-sanitise life. We can’t over-sanitise art. We also can’t give in to a group of people who see trauma in everything.

The kind of people pushing for trigger warnings are usually either offended by everything, or afraid of everything anyway.

They’re the kind of people that would sit in the front row of a comedy gig and say ‘you know what, I was offended from start to finish!’ Well, leave then!

‘I watched the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy back to back and I hated every single minute of it’. Turn it off! Watch La La Land instead!

I think these are the kind of people who want us all to jazz hand instead of clap, and I don’t want to give in to those people!

Please don’t misunderstand me, the world can be a scary place and I think we’ve come a long way when it comes to recognising that people have anxiety and other such conditions and that we need to be sensitive to that and offer them better mental health care.

But nobody has the right to not be offended. Life is a game of risk. We take calculated risks every single day – whether it’s crossing a road, what food we eat, getting on an aeroplane, frankly, just leaving the house at all.

I see things every day that offend me, people offend me every day. But I get on with it, I don’t want to ban things. First come the trigger warnings, then comes the cancellation. Cancel culture is very real.

People just can’t take offence anymore. If you say something people don’t like, gone are the days where people rolled with the punches. Now, they slam you on social media, try to get you fired from your job and probably pressure your wife into leaving you and taking the kids with her.

But there was another story today that got me going as well.

The iconic deckchairs in Bournemouth are going to be banned, just in case someone uses them as a weapon…Deckchairs have been a part of Bournemouth’s coastline for 100 years but now, apparently, they’re a threat to life and must be cancelled.

We’re cancelling deckchairs now in the name of public safety.

And this is the point, yes, they’re only deckchairs, yes, I’m not going to sit here on national television and get genuinely angry about a cloth and wood based sunlounger, but these deckchairs now symbolise something.

It’s the life of the masses, most people, being impacted upon because a small group of people decided that an even smaller group of people may or may not one day do something bad with those deckchairs.

We can’t live our lives like that. We can’t see risk and danger in everything and then change everything to accommodate for that!

Where does this end? Will we one day be confronted with the reality of being allowed out of our padded cells for an hour a day, putting factor 70 suncream on underneath our clothes, which are made out of bubble wrap, putting our ear plugs in just in case we accidentally hear a joke, and making someone sign a consent form before you say hello to them in the street?

I don’t want to live in that world!