Pity a Poor Flower Girl

At the moment there's a bit of a fuss over some bloke from Essex who slipped on a tulip petal outside a florist's at a London station getting some reportedly enormous amount of compensation awarded by a judge. Now this is fair enough if the man has got a genuine injury and there are sufficient grounds to indicate that the florist in question has not taken enough due care to protect the public from harm. However the other side of the coin is of course that if Mister Compensation Winner had been paying sufficient attention to where he was going then he wouldn't have slipped over and got hurt. Of course the main problem here is not the litigation or the fact that someone has been given an apparently over-generous award for injury but that people just don't take sufficient care in what they are doing any more and end up being negligent.
Then of course there is the expectation that whatever happens is somebody's fault and therefore someone must pay or else justice will not be seen to have been done. The practical outcome in this case is that someone may have been disabled, someone else may lose their livelihood and the only real winners are the greedy compensation solicitors who hover overhead like vultures waiting for a kill.

Now there's a thought - a number of years ago I sent a girl some flowers which did not give the desired result - can I sue the florist for all the mental anguish this caused?