MR PENDLE: New Euro rules on Christmas crackers are simply crackers!

Mr Pendle has not been at the Christmas crackers early this year - this is not a joke, it is actually happening in this country right now.

Something called the Pyrotechnic Articles (Safety) Regulations have been brought into force - and what it means is in practice, retailers will have to demand ID from anyone who appears to be under 25 and who wants to buy Christmas crackers - and nobody under the age of 16 will be allowed to buy them.

North-West MEP Paul Nuttall has slammed the idea as “utterly crazy” and says bureaucrats seem to assume everybody is an idiot and every child is a budding Guy Fawkes hoarding crackers in an attempt to blow up the House of Commons in a cataclysm of bad jokes and paper hats.

Crazy the ban most certainly is, but Mr Pendle has a far simpler, better and more appropriate way of describing this latest piece of Brussels-based bureaucracy.

Crackers!

MR Pendle cannot make his mind up about Pendle Council’s plans to put a weaving shuttle in the middle of Nelson.

He can see the merits in both sides of the argument - those who say it will be a reminder of the town’s textile heritage, and those who say today’s generation will not know what it is.

That line of thought reminds him of the time he attended a management course in Blackpool and walked past a linotype machine - a relic of the days when the newspaper industry employed printers and compositors to put pages together - and found he was one of only two people who knew what it was, the other, younger students born into the computer age having no idea.

And Mr Pendle supposes there will be those who will ask him, as a son of Trawden whose only excuse to come to Nelson is to work, what is put up in Nelson has got to do with him, in the same way the old grouch asked a spectator at a Roses cricket match who had taken his southern-based wife along with him what it had to do with her.

SO a gang leader who is serving at least 35 years in jail for a double murder has won the right to be addressed by prison staff using the courtesy title “Mister”, has he?

The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman has upheld the man’s complaint against staff at the jail where he is imprisoned.

On what grounds was the complaint upheld?

And having won this concession, what can we expect the man to demand next?

That he is afforded the kind of luxuries enjoyed by the infamous Harry Grout in TV’s comedy “Porridge”?