Rule Britannia

AS much as I love our English heritage and the country's great history of resistance and rebellion, its dark underbelly of miserable autocrats, grasses and collaborators has always disgusted me. It is often said by historians that the average member of the Nazi Party was a jumped-up bureaucrat from the German petty-bourgeosie, but that lot have nothing on the 'special' police officers, traffic wardens, station ticket collectors and other would-be dictators who patrol our little island like pocket Gestapo. In my opinion, any small victory over this homegrown plague of uniformed bullies is always a victory for the common people and I was reminded of these inferiority-complexed tyrants when I spotted an article in yesterday's Guardian.

We have always had a country code in rural England and observing simple behaviour like closing a fence when you enter a field or taking your litter home with you seems all well and good. However, it has been discovered that local councils have been enforcing a whole range of ridiculous measures that sound as though they were devised by some grey-suited man sitting in a grey-coloured office with grey-tinted windows, or a frustrated spinster with a bee in her bonnet about other people actually enjoying themselves.

Shouting, apparently, has now been banned from the English countryside. That means you can no longer go into the centre of a forest, miles away from anyone else, and scream your head off to your heart's content. Stroking ponies is also off-limits for some local authorities, so I can only surmise that these poor creatures are gradually worn away by all the affection they receive. And then we have the unforgiveable crime of wild swimming, which no doubt pleases the more prudish members of the trout population and saves the Government having to pay for travelling lifeguards. How on earth would Shakespeare have written Hamlet without an obliging Ophelia to come floating down the stream like a fallen branch? Meanwhile, don't even think about pitching a tent or dozing off on the beach. It seems that normal people only sleep in beds with designer pyjamas and IKEA pillow cases.

One of the strangest rules to have come into force recently is the ban on using catapults. I seriously doubt whether an intifada is likely to break out in the wilds of Dorset, so I suppose it must be illegal to move a stone from one place to another without permission. Furthermore, you are no longer allowed to swear and that means the sheep can finally take the wool out of their ears without having to listen to the foul language that magically appears whenever anyone snags their wedding tackle on an electric fence. As for drinking, forget it! Picnics may as well be secret bombmaking classes and the penalty for daring to toast a passing dragonfly is possibly worse than that for deliberately starting a fire or hacking a walker to death with a homemade machete. Thank goodness we defeated fascism!