DON’T you just love eccentric Brits? There’s clearly something in our national psyche that loves to challenge authority in the most bizarre way possible just to prove a point.

Did you know, for instance, that a colander is viewed in some quarters as religious headgear. No, I didn’t either. Nor, it seems, did the DVLA when confronted by Brighton dad Ian Harris demanding the right to use a photo of him wearing said colander as his driving licence identity.

Ian is a member of that well-known movement, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster whose followers are known as Pastafarians, which therefore necessitates the wearing of a colander as a religious garment. But of course it does.

He reckons that wearing his pasta strainer is the equivalent to Muslim women being pictured in hijabs or Sikhs in their turbans. And as such, he’s challenging DVLA’s decision not to allow his holy (groan) colander hat in his licence photo.

He wants to win the argument in the same way that fellow believer, Austrian Niko Alm did back in 2011 when he won the legal right to be photographed in his strainer.

Ian reckons he has a spiritual connection with the Flying Spaghetti Monster and he says that until DVLA officials are issued with brain probes proving otherwise, he should be allowed his religious freedom in the same way that followers of major religions are.

The religion was founded in 2005 as a protest against the teaching of creationism and intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in science classes. Followers believe the invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe and end their prayers with ‘ramen’ rather than amen in recognition of the Japanese noodles.

Ian’s colander headgear reminds me of the time I was slumbering away in the local magistrates’ court during my days as a weekly newspaper reporter when what later turned out to be a Home Office boffin barged through the door of the court to answer a charge of riding a motor-cycle without protective headgear.

He was eccentric in appearance never mind behaviour. It was a boiling hot day but he was dressed in a long gabardine raincoat that swished his ankles, a knitted hat that looked for all the world like my nan’s tea-cosy, and carried one of those old-fashioned string bags inside of which was a supermarket carrier with a spherical shaped object hidden inside it.

Turns out he’d been nicked riding a 49cc Batavus moped wearing a yellow plastic mixing bowl on his head, topped off with a parka hood held on with a webbing luggage strap that he’s tied under his chin.

He pleaded not guilty because he maintained his do-it-yourself helmet was perfectly adequate protection, especially as he was swiftly passed on his little phut-phut by what he termed as thrusting young men on racing bikes. So as they didn’t have to wear helmets he didn’t see why he had to.

The law, he boomed grandly to the collectively jaw-dropped inhabitants of the courtroom, was an ass. And the plastic mixing bowl – which, he told fascinated reporters afterwards, he had purchased from the local Woolies (remember them?) for the grand total of thirty pee - was his instrument for proving his point, just as the colander was for flying spaghetti monster-follower Ian.

Given that he’d technically broken the law the bemused magistrates had no choice but to find him guilty, much to his disgust.

Asked to produce his driving licence at the end of the proceedings so it could be endorsed with the pre-requisite three points, he marched up to the magistrates’ bench and tore it up in front of them, leading to an immediate arrest for contempt of court.

The by now wide awake local press corps had a field day with this one, with the local stringer hot-footing it to the nearest public callbox (yes, this was before the days of mobiles) to phone copy through to Fleet Street’s red top news desks.

Although this was in the days before photo ID driving licences I can’t help but wonder that if this had happened today would our eccentric Home Office boffin be demanding the right to use a picture of himself wearing a yellow plastic mixing bowl on his head...