On frisking guests for spoons and other faux-pas

I don't frisk my guests for spoons when they leave. Do you? Does anyone? Maybe we move in rarefied circles in which such practice is unnecessary. Maybe we should check our privilege.

But that doesn't mean it's open season on my spoons: even though I don't put up a sign telling people not to steal my spoons (or to not look for cash in drawers in my bureaux; or to not pocket small paperbacks from my bookshelves that they like the look of). I also don't put up signs telling people not to end sentences with prepositions.

Apart from anything else (and this is not meant to be the best reason not to steal your friends' spoons), think of the message it sends to your children. Or the message it sends to the children in the family with fewer spoons.

"Oh, that must have been Great-Uncle Bob again! What a card he is! Always at the spoons. He jangles on the way out - but we just tolerate it. Ha ha ha. Just stir it with your finger, dear - we're out of spoons."

At a car park at a certain school, there are signs that say 'Strictly No Parking'. Sometimes they're hard to see because of cars parked in front of them. Sometimes they're hard to see when there isn't a car parked in front of them because they've been knocked over by cars and are lying in a ditch.

The reason for their presence is obvious. There are two lanes at the exit. If people park in the left-turning lane, the traffic that could easily and quickly get out by turning left into the empty part of the road is stuck behind a very long line of cars that are waiting to turn right but can't get out because turning right involves joining a slow moving congestion of vehicles.

(That slow moving congestion is caused by the inability of traffic to turn into the same car park at the entrance slightly further up the road. The reason they can't turn in is because the car park is full because traffic can't get out because... you get the idea.)

And what signal does it send to the children? "Yes, mummy doesn't have to obey these signs - they're for other people, isn't it convenient for us to park here?" "Yes, daddy's only going to be here for a few minutes so that's okay." "Don't worry about the honking, they're just annoyed that I got the space first."

We're going to get children brought up believing that they should just do what suits them and damn the consequences. We're going to get children who won't technically be ignoring the signs because they won't register them in the first place. Lock your cutlery drawer.