Encounters with British electricity

As if the lead tainted plumbing still in existence over most of the country wasn't bad enough... You would not believe how crazy the electricity here is! I thought that I was pretty DIY savvy. I knew how to throw a switch back on if one was thrown off, and even though I have never seen a old school fuse box, I'm sure I could easily pull out a fuse and replace it with a new one if I had to or even use a penny to temporarily fix it, as I've replaced fuses in cars before (thanks to Phil's Nissan truck).
So, I took this bravado with me as I decided to change a light fitting in the new flat. I switched off the main power point with the fuses in it and then unscrewed the light fitting to take out the old wires and put in the new ones for the new light. But the old wires didn't really jive with my new light, so I'll need to get a DIY book from the library to figure that out, but I'm thinking it won't be so hard. In the mean time, I decided to try and isolate all of the fuses in my fuse box and label them with little stickers so I would know which were which in case anything ever blew. That's when I gave our fuse box a good hard look and realized it didn't look anything like I had ever seen or heard about before. So, I did what any good internet surfer would do, I googled "how to change a fuse" with Google UK. And this is what I saw...
Amazing video showing how the UK is still in the dark ages when it comes to electricity!
Can you believe I have to make my own freaking fuse? It's not just some pull out thingy that you buy at Home Base. I mean, I'm a fairly competent DIYer and I'd have to say an all around bright person, so I'm sure I can do this. But I HAVE to, as that's how things are done here! You'd think with all of the lead pipes in this country, the general population wouldn't be smart enough to figure this thing out without blowing themselves up. But, for some reason I don't hear about people getting killed while changing fuses, so apparently either they just don't blow that often, or people grow up knowing how to wire their own fuses. And it's so normal here to unscrew your plug and change it if you need to. But I've NEVER heard of anyone in the states doing that sort of thing. They just throw away an appliance if something goes wrong with it. So, I guess in some sort of health and safety sort of way it's a bad thing, but in an environmental or sustainable way it's a good thing. It was just a shock to my system when I saw this video and realized that I needed to go and buy fuse wires in case of a blow out.