Elf n Safety Innit.

Home-baking stalls at Dundee summer events.

A rant by By Nicola Barry, Press and Journal.

Nanny Gordon Brown says we are a bunch of fat, lazy consumerists, who attempt to thrive on sugar, salt, fat, alcohol and wheeze-inducing smoke.

Nanny says that, as a nation, we eat so much we can barely get through our own front doors without a crowbar. Nanny offers a motherly combination of compassion and a scolding finger, the ubiquitous jabbing forefinger – even if the facts she keeps pointing out are somewhat obvious, such as sugar makes you fat and too many gins make you drunk.

Nanny’s rules go on and on. You shouldn’t play conkers at school. Rugby is too tough for small boys. No pictures of children must ever be taken at the school panto.

You name it, some idiot, somewhere, has outlawed it.................................

Local authority and government employees, people who say they are public servants, who are paid with our council and income taxes, seem to think they know what is best for us. And that is what a nanny is for, isn’t it?

Before they invent their little rules, there is no consultation, no deliberation – just this hard-and-fast diktat which makes absolutely no sense to 99% of the population it affects.

Political correctness has become the bane of our lives.

It would be better if we just stayed indoors, didn’t go anywhere or do anything.

People, especially, children, have to take risks. It is part and parcel of growing up.

But biting into a home-made scone in the school playground?

I can think of a better use for an oven than baking – and it involves the advice and conciliation manager.

That just takes the biscuit.