no bs

It’s funny the things you miss when away from home. The food you didn’t give a thought to, the weather you always complained about, the British Standard 1363 electrical plug…

Turns out, what really gets my patriotic juices flowing is a well-designed mains plug. My (somewhat limited) travels have so far taken me across Europe and North America, and I have yet to see a decent plug on either continent.

I define “decent” in the following ways:

1. staying in the effing wall
Most appliances require a constant supply of electricity to function. This is how electricity works. An iron stops being hot when the electrical supply is interrupted, and a vacuum cleaner ceases vacuuming under similar conditions. Why then, would anyone make a plug that finds staying in a socket a near impossibility when the appliance is moved the slightest distance?

It would be fine if I just wanted to iron the one iron-shaped patch of my t shirt, but that actually causes fires, so I’ll give it a miss, if that’s alright with you. And I have this weird thing about vacuuming the whole room, not just a tiny portion of it – it just feels cleaner to me somehow.

So why would anyone think a plug that fails to maintain even a semblance of a connection to the mains, would be anywhere near adequate? It’s not; stop pretending it’s ok. It really, really isn’t.

2. not killing you

The BS 1363 is a fine plug because it has an earth pin, and its corresponding socket has shutters. The earth pin is a safety feature woefully lacking from non-uk plugs, to their detriment, and everyone else’s intense danger.

The sterling design of the good old BS 1363 ensures that the earth pin is inserted first, and removed last, by making it longer than the other two. This means that if the plug is accidentally detached from the socket, the live wire becomes disconnected before the earth pin. Also, no-one gets electrocuted.

It also prevents electrocution through the use of the aforementioned shutters. The socket is also part of the genius, you see. It has shutters, which can be opened, only when the plug is inserted correctly. This means you can’t shove things into it that aren’t meant to be shoved there. Things like pencils, and scissors, and plastic farm animals – basically all the things Younger Sister used to like posting into the video recorder. She would somehow manage to obtain all manner of toys and stationary, and take great glee in having a right old post of them into the video recorder. She would then catch someone’s attention with an angelic yet devilish “look what I posted” and while we were wondering how she had managed to wreak such havoc in under a minute, and whether the video machine would ever work again, we would think “at least she can’t post things into the sockets”.

There’s also switches on the sockets, so you can plug things in when the current is switched off. This is much less likely to kill you. I say “bonus”!

3. glorious history

During the early 40s a committee was convened to assess the problems likely to affect the peacetime rebuilding of Britain. This was established by Lord Reith, who is also known for causing a stir whilst serving as Director-General of the BBC, by reporting multiple points of view on the 1926 General Strike, including the TUC. Not the Labour Party, though – that was a step too far for the Conservative government of the time.

Enough trivia – the point is, after the upheavals of two world wars, the people of Britain had a jolly good think about how to make the world a bit less awful. Out of this period came the welfare state, a new human-centric approach to architecture and town planning, and the introduction of national safety standards.

It was a time when people decided to change the world for the better, and part of that was deciding that homes should be less of a death trap. Part of that is stopping the electrical appliances killing everyone. Now, we complain about needing a stool-standing certificate to be able to use a step-stool. But at one time, there really wasn’t a single safety regulation, and we risked our lives in factories for a penny every three weeks and had to walk seven miles to school in the pouring rain, and if we ever talked to our teachers like that we were for it, “it” being the cane.

So really we should be happy about how the BS 1363 has been designed with the cord at the bottom, so you can’t yank it out of the socket by the cord – which is not safe, and isn't at all clever. The body of the plug is also wide so it keeps your fingers away from the pins when they are near the socket.

All in all, it’s a pretty good plug. You might disagree if you’ve ever stood on one in bare feet, but that’s hardly the plug’s fault, is it? Blame your giant feet, you clumsy, clumsy oaf.

Another British safety feature is not putting power outlets in bathrooms. Tell any American this and they respond "but then how do you use electrical appliances in the bathroom?" You don't. It's to stop you killing yourself. But is that much legislation going too far to protect people from their own incompetence?

I'm all for freedom - freedom to have a legal union with another consenting adult, regardless of gender, freedom of assembly, movement, speech, from disease and danger - these are all good freedoms. I'm not so sure we need to protect the freedom to use a waffle iron three inches from the bathtub. And while I'm generally a peaceable sort, I can see only advantages if an electrical standards obsessed warlord were to conquer the offending weak-plugged countries and bestow in their benevolence the glorious BS 1363 upon their grateful new subjects. It's just something about the BS 1363 that gets me all riled up like that.

Well, come the revolution you'll see what I mean...