Oh, the dangers that lie in a cake

So what if it takes 450 policemen, assorted spooks and a helicopter to arrest two young brothers who'd raided the dressing-up box before going out to a demo?

You just never know where the next suicide bomber or chemical attack is coming from.

So congratulations then to Age Concern, managers of a daycare centre in Barnstaple, for averting a potentially fatal incident by banning Mrs Elanie Richards, a retired district nurse and Women's Institute member, from bringing in a home-made cake when she visited an elderly friend.

The suspect Madeira was excluded on health and safety grounds because its ingredients were unknown and it could have wiped out the entire residents' lounge. Shop-bought cakes, however, are allowed.

Let's examine this a little closer.

The "killer" cake contained flour, unsalted butter, sugar, free range eggs and grated lemon rind. A shop-bought equivalent would contain all of the above, plus E475, E100, E106b, E471, E475, E450, E500, E170? I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.

As ever, a mealy-mouthed jobsworth is wheeled out to try to justify the stupidity of the decision. Step forward, Andrea Scott, regional director of Age Concern: "We don't know where these cakes come from but if something went wrong then we could be sued. If I let one person do this, it will open the floodgates."

Like the floodgates reference, Andrea. I now have this vision of a Devon care home gradually being buried beneath a mountain of malevolent Maderia.

I SUPPOSE that if we're no longer going to let them eat cake, we may as well make old people thoroughly miserable by taking away their televisions as well.

It has emerged that thousands of short-stay care home residents are being pursued for the full £131.50 licence fee if they have a television in their rooms. Now while long-term residents are charged a fee of £5 a year and over-75s don't have to pay at all, the BBC's legalised muggers have decided that thanks to a loophole in the legislation, they can now extort the full amount from the frail and sick.

Ironically, the news comes in the same week as the announcement that millionaire BBC chairman Michael Grade is to pocket a £60,000 pay rise for taking charge of the BBC Trust, a new set-up that will replace the board of governors. This will take Mr Grade's salary to £140,000 a year for a four-day week. Not bad work, if you can get it.

The back of the fag packet tells me that this is around £122.81 an hour or, in simple terms, near enough one household's licence fee for every 60 minutes spent discussing last night's Celebrity Karaoke Cooking On Ice over tea and biscuits. And probably enough to pay the licence fees of all those short-term patients in care homes ? AS World Cup fever spreads, the politically correct tie themselves in knots in their pathetic attempts to stamp out this rampant patriotism. Police in Hampshire have warned (with straight faces as well) that car flags could easily generate a "loud flutter" which might scare wildlife and cause horses to bolt - a major consideration, I'm sure, in downtown Portsmouth.

Meanwhile Tesco has been forced into a humiliating climbdown over its ban on delivery drivers carrying flags on its vehicles after it was gently pointed out to them that Tesco stores were full of? England flags.

Of course, nowhere is the snobbery over the flying of the Cross of St George more apparent than in the pages of The Guardian. As far as their readers are concerned, we're all closet racists who are using the World Cup as a cover to plot the forced repatriation of the bloke from the corner shop.

Nice then to see a dose of reality on the letters page, the usual hang-out of smart-arse lefties.

Replying to one correspondent from Surrey, who had sneeringly asked where he might obtain an Argentinian flag for his car window, Steve Ridgeway from Macclesfield writes: "Daniel Adler is in luck. I have three, all of them liberated in a place called Goose Green back in 1982. I look forward to the mirth it will produce in Farnham."