Ours is the era of health and safety. The Government puts warnings on alcohol, so we know that drinking a litre of gin might have fewer health benefits than going to the gym. Packets of nuts are emblazoned with "Warning: May contain nuts".
One manufacturer put on its hairdryer packaging, 'Do not use while sleeping'. Every conceivable eventuality is accounted for by danger-obsessed apparatchiks with clipboards and hard hats.
As such, the Isle of Man TT races are an anachronism: a throwback to the days when men were men, and danger was a face to be laughed in. Because the TT, 100 years old this week, could well be the most dangerous sporting event on earth. Just ask Richard 'Milky' Quayle.
The races are held on the 37.7-mile mountain course. It goes from sea-level to 1,300ft, and contains over 200 bends. At its centre is Snaefell mountain, from which local legend states that you can see six kingdoms: Man, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland and the sixth, Heaven. Racing began on the island in 1904 with the Gordon Bennett car trials (a precursor to the Cor Blimey Guv'nor Road Race, surely?).
The TT began in 1907, with the island chosen for its lack of speed limit, a quirk that survives to this day. The first race, on a shorter course, was won by Charlie Collier, with an average speed of 38.21mph. Last year, John McGuinness won the event's blue riband event, the Senior TT, with an average lap speed of 129.45mph. That's an average speed, over a course of hills, bends, stone walls, lampposts, houses, hamlets and villages. Bikes regularly reach speeds of 200mph on the straights.
Between 1949 and 1976 the TT had World Championship status, until deemed too dangerous. Surely riders would stop coming to such a perilous event that carried no official status. But still they came, year after year.
TT fans, 55,000 of whom will be there this week, are among the most passionate and knowledgeable at any sporting event. For them, names such as Daytona, Monaco, Silverstone, Indianapolis and Le Mans are irrelevances.
The true home of motor sport is the Isle of Man: a place where the greats are remembered at every bend and milestone, with names harking back to the era of 14-time winner Mike Hailwood, the great Jimmie Guthrie, or John Surtees, still the only man to win world championships in both motorcycling and Formula One. In 1959, Surtees won the race in horrendous conditions, and had to be physically lifted from his bike at the finish. "The hail was so strong it took paint off," he remembered. "I sort of got frozen to the spot."
But of all the greats, one stands taller than the rest. Joey Dunlop won a staggering 26 races at the TT. He was so obsessed with the event that he turned up in 1989 on crutches, determined to race until organisers forbade it. A phenomenal racer, he was a man who never lost sight of life outside sport, and three times drove his own van to eastern Europe to deliver aid to stricken peoples. He died at a road event in Estonia in 2000 where there had been no fatalities since 1961. He was, of course, leading at the time.
Death is, inevitably, the unmentioned guest at the feast. In 100 years, 223 people have been killed in the TT or the Isle of Man GP (on the same course). It is a horrible, tragic statistic. But it is not one the riders are unaware of. They know the risk, and they embrace it. They ride not in spite of danger, but because of it. I cannot claim to understand it - I am to courage what Peter Crouch is to bodybuilding - but I certainly respect it.
To John McGuinness, those who seek to ban the event are "a bunch of do-gooders . . . We all know that we accept the risks. Maybe we're a bunch of hard-nosed bastards." That 'maybe' seems a little superfluous.
The TT riders know that the twin impostors of triumph and disaster are separated by fractions of seconds, and sometimes by sheer, dumb luck. They choose to race not because they seek death, but because they seek life at its most extreme, visceral. The homogenised, pasteurised, semi-skimmed version of life is not for Milky, McGuinness and the rest. They want the cream.
Every year, people die climbing Everest, yet pursuit of the peak is seen as noble. The TT riders' Everest is a 2,036ft mountain called Snaefell. And, with any luck, when they're up there, the glimpse they get of that sixth kingdom will only be a fleeting one.