Room 101

You don’t need consent to be a miserable sod! THIS WEEK?

THE worst days are the ones where you wake up knowing you’ve done something terrible.

Those feelings are often accompanied by two things – the pulsating hangover of imminent doom and an icy stare from the missus that’s so cold you can feel your nuts shrivelling up into your actual arse.

But at least somewhere in the haze of fuddled memory there was a point to it all. You might, possibly, have even been having fun before it all went horribly wrong.

Not so for the sort of people who were apparently born just plain miserable, however.

Take North Wales resident Nicola Mitchell, of Prestatyn, for instance. A hitherto, presumably relatively normal member of the public who has hit the headlines this week for all the wrong reasons.

For Nicola has taken herself off for an elongated stay in the Village of High Dudgeon over the very disturbing news that she, er, scandalously keeps a horse in an open field right next to a public footpath.

Now the nag, called Betty, has developed a habit of displaying her teeth and grinning like a madwoman when people pay it attention.

So when young dad David Bellis was passing the field with his three-year-old son Jacob, he decided Betty might make part of a nice selfie.

The resulting pic was so funny that unlike most selfies, David and his partner Rhian Jones actually decided to hang on to it.

Then Thomson Holidays announced they were holding a win-a-holiday competition – and all you had to enter the “Made Me Smile” event was to send in a photo that did just that.

Lo and behold, they won – scooping a £2,000 family holiday into the bargain. A holiday that the young family have never been able to afford before.

Great, right? Well, not if you’re Nicola Mitchell, owner of the grinning horse.

She said: “I was really annoyed to hear he had won a £2,000 holiday and had used a picture of our horse without our permission. He should have asked for our consent.

“I did not give him permission to use our horse in a competition. If I had known about it we would have entered it ourselves and could have won as Betty is always sticking out her tongue.”

When I first read this story my eyes popped out on cartoon stalks.

Did she REALLY think “consent” was needed to take a picture of a horse in a frigging field?

It’s hardly like asking your neighbour’s 19-year-old daughter to pose for artistic nude shots, is it?

Nicola – who’s received backing from some equally deluded friends and family members – has now even reportedly moved Betty elsewhere to prevent others from cashing in on her pet animal’s toothy grin.

Meanwhile, Nicola herself is presumably looking forward to a new career as a traffic warden or Child Support Agency call centre worker.