WAY back in history in the days when people could smoke in public without having to shout “unclean” or hang a bell around their necks, there used to be places called pubs. You might remember them. They were quirky places which had their own particular smell and atmosphere. They sold something called beer and were visited by a now almost extinct species called “blokes”.

In those days some of these pubs used to display signs aimed at anti-social smokers who not only filled the air with their deadly fumes but would also drop their ash and even their fag ends on the floor. The signs used to say, “When the floor is full please feel free to use the ashtrays.”

If Penrith is a measure of what happens in our other towns, and it usually is, then similar signs need to be posted on lampposts everywhere saying, “When the pavements are full please feel free to park legally somewhere else.”

Parking on the footpaths and pavements has reached epidemic proportions and is probably as bad, if not worse, than it was during that period when the police arbitrarily gave up enforcing parking laws and before the council took the job on.

It seems that some motorists believe that if there are double yellow lines then the way to avoid a ticket is to drive straight over the lines and completely up on to the pavement.

Wrong on two counts. The safest place to park to avoid a ticket is ON the yellow lines. The parking attendants aren’t interested in offences which might cause a danger or obstruction (which is why the lines are there in the first place) they are too busy going from lawful car park to lawful car park spearing the fish in a barrel who haven’t set their disc properly or who have overstayed their time a little.

The other reason they are wrong is that they commit the greater offence of obstructing the highway because in law the highway includes the pavement. But it is not just the law which is breached, it is good manners and consideration for others. Blocking the pavement is a selfish and dangerous act.

Such problems are not just restricted to the town centre and its immediate environs. The age of multiple car ownership means that housing estate roads or rather pavements become completely filled with cars every evening and every weekend. On my estate it is not possible to walk along the pavement at all. Drivers park so close to their fences or hedges that even the local cats have to go round them and walk on the roads. Those with pushchairs and wheelchair users, just as they have to in town, are forced to dance with death as they negotiate the traffic.

There are a number of reasons why people park on the footpaths. On housing estates it is a combination of too many cars, garages full of junk and roads which building developers are allowed to make far too narrow because roads cost money and don’t make the builders any profit. The planning authorities should look at the problem and stop developers building piddling little roads which are so narrow that it is difficult to get through them on roller skates let alone one of those pointless 4x4 poser mobiles. In town it is because some drivers are just lazy and inconsiderate.

The problem is that neither the police (their mobile patrols drive by the most blatantly dangerous obstructions without seeming to notice them) nor the parking attendants (what’s obstruction?) want to take responsibility for what is a growing problem and danger.

Someone is going to get knocked down or an ambulance or fire engine is going to be prevented from reaching a serious incident.

THE problem with being a civilised country is that it encourages uncivilised behaviour from morons like those who assault and abuse nurses and doctors, usually in hospital casualty units.

Having first class medical care available 24 hours a day which can be accessed without having a penny in your pocket is a godsend to the majority, but yet another opportunity to be obnoxious and anti-social to abuse others, and we have no real deterrent or punishment for such people.

The logical outcome for someone who attacks a national health worker is for them to have their rights to national health treatment removed. But that is where civilisation gets in the way.

If a banned patient turned up at a doctor's surgery or an accident and emergency department we know and, more to the point, they know that they would never be turned away.

In some places where persistently violent or abusive patients were banned from normal NHS points of contact as a way of protecting health workers, special clinics were set up to cater for the violent ones, the result being that they were fast-tracked to medical services as a "punishment" for beating up nurses. Now that is ironic.

The major problem is that abuse and violence are usually the result of booze. Either the patient is drunk or their friends, who often become the most abusive and unreasonable, are also paralytic. Again civilisation steps in to be its own worst enemy. Why do we treat being drunk and incapable on a weekend night as an illness which requires the self-inflicted sufferer to be transported in an ambulance to vomit all over a hospital rather than in the gutter where they truly belong?

Our health service still holds a special place in the hearts of the British people, as do the people who work in it. It is almost impossible for the majority of us to imagine what is in the minds, if they have one, of those who attack such people for trying to help them.

There should be a special category of offence for "heroes" who attack nurses and part of their punishment should be for them to be shunned by society as the pariahs and parasites they are. Their mug-shots could be placed around their communities so "civilised" people like me would know not to offer them a sip of water even if they were dying of thirst.

THE consultation period for the change in what Eden District Council likes to call the “way it does its business”, or what the rest of us might refer to as moving the furniture around a bit, is almost over.

Gosh! Hasn’t it been exciting? Even my interest waned when after asking some questions early on it became apparent that, as usual, the consultation was an open-ended affair with movable goal posts and the public not informed about what their participation really meant. The council has the final say. I asked the question; would the council be bound by the result if there was an overwhelming vote against their preferred option? The answer was no.

That being the case, I have cast my preference on the principle that if politicians think it is good then let the voter beware. Besides, Eden Council couldn’t put on a Nativity play because they’d struggle to cast the three wise men. Where are they going to find seven to make up a cabinet?