ONCE there was the tyro who took a drink on a Friday and woke up on Tuesday, only mildly surprised to find himself in Singapore with a beard.

Once there was the reckless investor whose final bet of the day would be covered in stoor as that last, desperate 50p had been rescued from the back of the couch and was all that remained from a wad of notes and coins.

Now there is the pensioner who peers out from an upper storey window at park and pavement and decides that the best bet is to stay inside and have a cup of tea.

They are all the same person. I am that soldier.

The combination of Covid and the deep freeze has caused me to reflect on how I now assess risk. A couple of years ago I broke my arm when slipping on ice. It was a moment that had, of course, physical consequences. I walked around like Napoleon – arm hidden under jacket – for about six months, though I never contemplated invading Russia. Probably because it was too icy.

It did, however, cause me to consider risk. It’s a strange subject, observed through a personal prism but with a growing outside pressure that roars that risk is energising, exciting.

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The personal can be summarised in one observation. There was a day the other week when the NHS sent out tweets urging people to stay at home, with one hospital pointing out that the number of falls on the ice had produced casualties on the scale of a major bus crash. My day was subsequently illuminated – on social media and on the phone – by a couple of friends who are doctors hailing the benefits of their jog over terrain that would have caused Torvill and Dean to proceed with caution in their working gear. They had assessed or ignored the risk.

Any resulting injury (and they returned home safe as I counted them all out and I counted them all back) would have produced surely some embarrassment when facing colleagues in A&E and added to the pressure on an NHS that is so under siege that is forming a last line of defence and singing Men of Harlech.

But the invitation to risk, the wilful summoning of it from the ether, has calamitous causes that stray far beyond the individual.

There is a world view that is predicated on the belief that “you just have to get on with it” or “you could be hit by a bus”. Both statements are the acme of banality.

This bright-eyed sunny optimism has helped plunge the 21 century into its deepest crises. It is not hopelessly negative to say that positivity costs jobs, homes and lives.

This truth was never better elaborated than in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided which was particularly insightful on how “positive thinking” played a huge role in the financial collapse of 2007-2008. Banks took risks. They failed. The rest of us picked up the tab. Those who say that risk is the very substance of investment are, of course, correct. But banks were playing Russian Roulette with a fully-loaded shotgun.

It is not difficult to imagine a roomful of bespoke-suited gentlemen chanting in unison: “Let’s go for it. What can go wrong?” That question is still being answered in its disastrous after effects. The shotgun went off. Our blood was on the walls.

It is a philosophy that resounds in the world of politics. It can be seen in how some political advisers decide how to test their eyes but also in how a prime minister can view the advent of a health crisis.

Boris Johnson peered at the tsunami of Covid and decided that we all might get a jolly good soaking but it could break over our heads. He said: “One of the theories is that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures.” He added: “I think we need to strike a balance.”

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This, in essence, was an assessment of risk and how he and his government would approach it. It was underpinned by a feeling of positivity that it couldn’t be as bad as it was being depicted and that risk had to taken. It’s the modern way. Except that it isn’t. Not everywhere. There are other countries who adopted what Johnson called “draconian methods”. Many of their vulnerable citizens have thus lived to thank their politicians.

Yet those cautious countries and their leaders were accused of “panic”, even of sabotaging the health of their inhabitants and the economy of the country. The message then was that Covid was “something we had to live with”. Instead it was something that more than two million people – and counting – have died from.

Risks have been taken. The gambles have failed. There have been positive statements. They are merely empty noises. A contagious fatal disease has, despite sound-bites and positive attitudes, continued to be a contagious fatal disease. Who would have guessed?

The “let’s get on with it” attitude in business and in politics from boardrooms in 2007 to Cabinet rooms in 2020 has been so disastrous that it recalls the peep of the whistle that sent men over the top in the trenches. As Siegfried Sassoon might remark of these chairman and political leaders:

‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both with his plan of attack

The truth is that risk is part of life. But it has been undervalued, underestimated or ignored. There are those who protest that it is better to live one day as a lion than a thousand years as a lamb. Yet surely there is a middle way. Is it not possible to live as a rational human being who knows there are no certainties but establishes and weighs up possible outcomes before deciding on a course of action?

We don’t have to be the unthinking lion or the neurotic lamb. Take it from one who has learned this lesson from a moment of being Bambi on ice.

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