Don’t take a blind bit of notice of the rules

Are you all Dun, Helen? THIS USED TO BE A COSY TOWN

It’s not just lockdown rules that are changing. Because now that checking your eyesight is an acceptable reason for driving 60 miles, the rules for everything are different.

To start with if you tell an optician you can only see six feet ahead of you, and even that is blurred and completely purple, you will no longer be tested with an old-fashioned eye chart.

Instead they will ask you to drive a tractor to a wellknown beauty spot.

Then they will diagnose a weakened retina, because you caused a multi-car pile-up by ploughing through the central reservation on the M6 by Stafford services.

Arsonists can say: “Hello officer. I needed to see if I was colour blind, so I set fire to the church to check I could distinguish the bright orange of the flames pouring from the roof from the musty grey of the smoke drifting across the town.

“The good news is my eyes seem to be in good working order. Bye for now.”

This should also revolutionise the way drink-drivers are dealt with. From now on the police won’t have to muck about with cumbersome breathalysers.

Instead, if the police suspect a driver may be completely drunk they will ask them to drive 60 miles – making sure that before they set off they’ve put a small child on the back seat.

Because of Dominic Cummings, now you can break any rule you’ve given to others if you say: “I used my discretion.”

If Dominic was an air steward his safety announcement would go: “In the

Five years ago I made one of my “In Town” radio shows about Barnard Castle.

I started off by saying part of its charm was that no one knew it existed – and you expected the locals to whisper: “Tell no one we are here, for we do appear but once every five and twenty years.”

All that’s ruined now.

It’s such a gentle town, the only conflict

FIELD OF VISION Tractor could test Dom’s eyesight event of an emergency, calmly follow the arrows towards the exit door. Don’t run or collect your belongings because this will obstruct me, and I’ll be running and collecting my belongings and pushing everyone else out of the way, possibly into the smoke pouring in from the engines. But don’t worry, I’ll be using my discretion.”

If he’d been a warden in the Second World War he’d have said: “It is essential we maintain a total blackout following an air raid siren.

“But it was all right for me to turn on floodlights across the garden all night and play a game of five-a-side football, because I was using my discretion.”

The other catchphrase the Government seems keen on is “we have to move on”. This is fine, as long as everyone is allowed to do this when they’ve been caught breaking rules too.

The next time a bank robber is in court he should say: “We can argue all there involved a protest because, according to a furious resident, “an olive green BT cabinet was erected near the Scarth Memorial Hall. Surely we should have been notified”.

A group was set up to make its feelings known, coming up with a proposal to knit a large tea cosy to cover up the cabinet.

There might be

BREW-HAHA day about who aimed a sawn-off shotgun at who, but what the British people want now is for us all to move on.”

And Boris Johnson now says there’s no point in comparing our figures of infection rates to other countries, as we had been doing until we became the worst in Europe.

If he was running a Formula 1 team he’d say: “There’s no point comparing our times to those of Lewis Hamilton. The fact he finished four days ahead of us, and we had to push the car round the last nine laps because the steering wheel fell off, teaches us nothing.”

They seem to have given up even trying to make sense – and that’s probably for the best. riots going on in America, but they don’t have Barnard Castle’s level of social breakdown and urban anger.

However, the following week the Mercury reported: “Having considered their tea cosy protest, fear of getting into trouble with the authorities is making them think twice.”

It’s not quite the spirit of Martin Luther King, but bless them for trying.

At that point they must have thought: “And that’s the last time anything will happen here that might ever put us in the news...”

Alan Carr is hosting a series called Epic Gameshow, reviving old quizzes such as Play Your Cards Right and The Price Is Right. I hope they’re suitably modernised, so that Supermarket Sweep would be “Supermarket Queue for 15 Minutes to Get In, Then Wait 20 Minutes Behind Someone Who Can’t Decide Which Pickled Onions She Wants”. And Who Wants to be a Millionaire? is called “Who Wants to be Furloughed Until the End of August?”

Tepid fury