There are a few things you can rely on at this time of year. The Queen's Speech will be awfully dull, there will be eight hours of soap operas on prime time TV on Christmas Day and the ghastly winner of the X Factor will be number one at Christmas for ever and ever.

And Mrs Clip will give me a look of disgust when she unwraps her presents again. I mean, what was wrong with an iron last year? She needed a new one, it was very thoughful.

But it seems many traditions are on their way out, thanks mainly to the health and safety jobworths, who even at Christmas are not content unless they are spoiling our fun.

I couldn't believe it when I read in last week's Free Press that sweets would no longer be thrown out at the pantomime

It is classed as "dangerous".

Dangerous is being a British soldier under fire in Iraq; dangerous is not sitting in a comfy seat at a warm theatre and trying to avoid getting hit by a wine gum.

How big an injury could you get by a tube of Smarties gently lobbed from the stage?

It sounds like some money-grabbing scally has been hit by a bag of marshmallows and thought 'where there's blame, there's a claim' and tried to get a bit of compensation to pay for all their Christmas booze.

What next? Christmas lights banned because someone claimed to be blinded by their neighbour's twinkling display?

Elsewhere, a headteacher at a school, presumably called Mrs Scrooge, has banned Santa from wearing red and told him to turn up in green because red is too commercial and too heavily linked with Coca-Cola.

And a Santa in a shopping centre in Scotland is refusing to put a pillow under his costume to look more portly because he says it encourages child obesity,

In South Wales, Santa can no longer go round with the Rotary Club because, after 30 years of the sitting in the back of a moving trailer and waving to kids, it's deemed too, you've guessed it, dangerous.

It's the same story for the Lions' Club event in Alnwick in Northumberland.

Where will it end? Let's make a New Year's resolution to not let the people who make the rules get us down next year.

Best wishes to all my readers for a happy Christmas and a healthy and prosperous New Year.

Paper Clip

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