MY WIFE AND I are having a couple of rooms built onto our cottage near Banbury, and she had expressed some concern over just how we intended to pay for it. Not to worry, says I - I'll simply nip down to the nearest burger joint, order up a steaming cup of coffee and dump it in my lap.

Parboiling my naughty bits may leave me squawking in soprano for a few days, but by the time the whole matter gets through the courts, we should have funds sufficient to buy the next six cottages down Mill Lane, build an Olympic-standard swimming pool for the village and have enough left to finance a tank of gasoline and a car wash.

For this, I tell Elizabeth, we have America to thank - or more specifically, the sort of cultural Lend-Lease that folk in the States and Britain have practiced over the decades and centuries, the adhesive that keeps them stuck to each other in spite of the common language that forever divides them in bewilderment.

Britain's contributions to transatlantic tranquility, for instance, include golf as a form of tension release (apoplexy, 4-irons in skulls), the Spice Girls (proof that a lack of talent is no bar to success) and the White House (from the paint job after the British tried to burn it down in 1814 - otherwise the place would be known as the Sort of Gray Stone With Streaky Dark Bits House).

For America's part, we no longer get fired (we are "downsized"), or go bald (we are "follically challenged"), or dress like slobs or Coco the Clown (we are "sartorially disenfranchised"). Also, some free spirits here have taken enthusiastically to the sport of drive-by shooting, and we get Jerry Springer and his daily TV dose of Pond Life USA.

Here, the latest import from the States is litigation, the game that all the family can play for fun and immense profits. Why grub away at some wretched job when you can relax with a very hot toddy and engage in the legal art of making Everest-sized piles of money by simply being incredibly stupid?

Which is how the solution to our cash-flow problem as regards the cottage extension popped into the balloon above my head, as - after managing to suspend my initial disbelief - I reread at the breakfast table the newspaper story that started:

"McDonald's is being sued over claims that its hot drinks are too hot."

It seems that 20 of Ronald the Clown's customers hereabouts are claiming that coffee and tea are served "at temperatures so hot that the drinker is at risk of scalding, and any spillage is likely to cause horrific injury. . ." They appear to have learned this painful bit of reality by scalding themselves to the point of needing skin grafts and are expressing their displeasure by suing the burger people for all they can get.

I was once told that there are three kinds of people - the ones who learn by reading, the few who learn by observation, and the rest who have to touch the fire to see for themselves if it's really hot.

In Britain, the cups in which hot drinks arrive at McDonald's bear the label: "Caution - Hot!" In my experience, that translates to: "Hey, Oatmeal Brain, this stuff is really, really hot and is gonna do some serious damage if you, like, dump it over yourself because you are some sort of total klutz or other form of dimwit from the Planet Zog."

Also, ever since I was knee-high to a percolator any hot drink arriving in my presence got there at a maximum temperature of 212 degrees F. That's the boiling point of water. I don't recall hearing that it had been raised, which means that hot drinks have been more or less the same temperature ever since we first learned how to light fires and burn down millions of acres of forests in 11 states.

Adrienne de Vos, a lawyer-type person representing 13 of the 20 wounded, says, "I know that some would say such drinks are meant to be hot and that people should simply take more care." Right on, Adrienne, good thinking.

But then she insists, "this misses the point." And the point being? "Customers don't realize just how hot and dangerous these drinks are." In other words, we may have progressed from Neanderthal to Nytol but some of us still know exactly zilch about the dangers of getting into hot water.

Naomi Wilson, another of the legal hounds involved in this case, allows as how "to reach the children's play area in a McDonald's, a child has to be taken through the main part of the dining area, where there are many hot drinks."

Somehow, that conjures up visions of greasy spoon eateries as sort of steel and chrome versions of the minefields around Khe Sanh, with steaming cups of coffee and tea and the occasional lemon and packet of milk arching through the arches, narrowly missing the fluorescents as they target ankle-biters and their minders.

Some of these tragic encounters with the basic laws of physics occurred as much as five years ago but are just now reaching the courts here. I puzzled over that for about 1.64 seconds - the time it took me to recall that not so long ago, a woman out in New Mexico got something like 700,000 bucks for mishandling a cup of McDonald's mud.

Britain remains backward in a lot of ways - any nation whose denizens dine on jellied eels, wash them down with room-temperature beer and top it off with a dish called spotted dick is still at Base Camp Two on civilization's mountain - but it moves with alacrity when it comes to pickup on fads generated in the former colonies.

Litigation is no exception. We've already had the case of a visiting professor from Dublin who sued and won $50,000 because he couldn't take an Irish joke, a computer programmer who got $4,000 when he claimed he had the right of way on a ski slope, and a pending suit over a fried lizard that was found in a burger joint's French fries.

Ah, well, if you can't beat 'em, join, 'em. Think maybe I will pop over to McDonald's in Banbury for a hot cuppa after all. Must remember to wear the Kevlar jockstrap, though. . .

Thought for the Day: Don't squat with your spurs on.

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