Now, our research department has come up with this."There are gasps of astonishment as DG puts on the table a thing that looks like a sticky-tape dispenser. He demonstrates that by plunging the neck of the bag into the gadget, you can seal the top of the bag in remorseless blue tape."Gosh, that's clever, DG. And when the customer gets home, he can just unseal it? Just pull the tape off?""Don't be stupid, Charles. Once the tape is on, it is impossible to get off, and the only way the customer can open the bag again is by wrenching it open with his teeth, or finding a pair of scissors and jabbing furiously at the bag.""Oh, dear Won't the customer kick up a fuss?""No, he won't. He won't be able to because we won't give the thing a name so he won't be able even to discuss the horrors of it."And so it came to pass that butchers all over the country started the present trend towards vegetarianism by fastening their bags in a hideous kind of tape which it is impossible to open, all except my favourite butcher in Bath, who still sells excellent meat and uses metal ties, and I think I would go there for the metal ties even if his meat was not so good.This is not the only weapon used by manufacturers Another one is to give their product a misleading name Video libraries, for instance. I have gone to libraries all my life to borrow books, which involves choosing a book, taking it home and leaving it lying around in anticipation of the moment you read it, for which purpose you need a week or two I am all in favour of deferred gratification. It is the only thing that makes sex bearable, for instance.When I first joined a video library, I assumed it obeyed the same sort of civilised laws, so I put my film by Luis Bunuel or Billy Wilder or whoever on the mantelpiece, preparing for a leisurely viewing.

What I got instead, of course, was a phone call saying that the damned thing was two days overdue."But I only got it out on Monday!" I expostulated. "I haven't watched it yet.""It was only an overnight loan," they said wearily."Call yourself a library?" I said. "Why, when I borrow a book ..."But they had gone.Take another example Restaurants. You know what a restaurant is? Then how dare McDonald's, the hamburger people, call their fast-food joints restaurants? They are no more restaurants than my video rental joint is a library.A lawyer writes: Whoops-a-daisy! I think you had better stop there, Mr Kington McDonald's are just a little touchy at the moment ....

Recently police in an American city hired a bus. They put a few plainclothes cops on board and then drove it down a busy road. At a pre- arranged moment a car driven by another policeman crashed - quite gently - into the rear of this bus The whole thing was filmed Instantly, passing pedestrians rushed to board. One woman called to others to join her and, in moments, an almost empty bus was full. All of these new passengers were subsequently arrested and charged with fraud What these people were after was compensation. They wanted it to look as if they had been on the bus when the crash happened. They knew that no matter how gentle and harmless the impact, they could claim all kinds of exotic injuries, maybe even behavioural changes resulting from post- traumatic stress disorder.

And they knew that the bus company, rather than go to court, would almost certainly settle, giving each of them a few thousand dollars. The fact that the police dreamed up the trick, that the pedestrians fell for it - and, I stress, almost everybody dived on to that bus - tells us something very depressing about the United States. It has become a compensation culture in which the first reaction to every vicissitude of life, real or imaginary, is to seek out someone to sue. Blame, in such a culture, must always be ascribed to something that can be taken to court - never to the workings of chance and certainly not to oneself.As a further crazy example, one man tried to kill himself on a New York subway but succeeded only in severing both his legs. He subsequently sued the transit authority for failing to prevent him from leaping, and won. The compensation culture accepts that you can be compensated for your own irresponsibility.The natural reaction to such stories is to laugh at them as yet further examples of the mad, lawyer-infested nation that America has become. But are we going the same way? Is everybody going the same way? Gemma Deacon, aged 13, is suing the British Flag Carnival Club and, get this, her father, for allowing her to be knocked down by a cyclist.

Maybe she has a case against the club, but I cannot believe, in a sane world, her father should be taken to court for "failing to supervise her adequately". And, of course, there was the recent case where policemen present at the Hillsborough football stadium disaster attempted to extract damages for their mental suffering. Happily they failed - policemen should expect to see unpleasant things occasionally.But, win or lose, the point is that people have embraced the stupid, legalistic idea that the courts exist to indemnify them against life. And it is no easy thing to persuade them that this is a dangerous, destructive idea. Compensation is a strange, slippery conception, loaded with cultural assumptions.