Friday, March 09, 2007

Way of the World

Just had another Council snippet passed on to me. It seems that an elderly lady (in her 90s) set fire to a few cuttings in her garden this week, as she does every spring as a precurser to tidying up for the summer. This year, the wee fire had been burning for about 10 minutes when the Council van came racing down her drive. It was the Environmental Health Officer (or was it the Health and Safety Officer?). "You cannot light a fire in your garden ma'am. You are causing a nuisance." After realising how utterly bizarre he must have seemed, I'm told that the man in the van rather sheepishly advised the elderly lady to set fire to her cuttings on Nov 5th. so that no-one would notice. Hard to make it up. And this is definitely true.

Even worse, Mr Arthur Bulmer, aged 79, wanted to clear his garden of sand which had blown onto it from the next door beach. He was just going to put it back. But NO. The man from the council (Fylde Council this time) said that tranferring anything from his garden onto the beach would constitute flytipping under the Neighbourhoods and Environment Act. Mr Bulmer will now need to contact a specialist waste disposal team at a cost of £500 I feel a bit guilty about this, because we have been passing regulations concerning this piece of legislation in the National Assembly. I hope I don't owe Mr Bulmer an apology.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

you're rigt about this. the world has gone nuts over new rules and regulations. its time for some common sense in the corridors of power. so stop making new laws that are just plain stupid