Shop lays bare why it bans naked dummies

1:48pm Friday 20th June 2008

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I VOWED that I wouldn't revisit the world of jobsworths and political correctness again for a while, but sometimes the best intentions of your columnist are thwarted by circumstances that are too compelling to resist.

How could I not share with you the experience of my daughter this week when she went to buy a dress in the new Eden centre in High Wycombe?

Not finding the size she was looking for on the rack, she checked the label on the display dummy adjacent to the display. Eureka! It was her size.

She approached an assistant, who summoned the manager, who explained that she couldn't take the dress off the dummy while the shop was open because - and dear reader you are now about to fall off your chair so grab hold of something to prevent injury - because. that would mean that the dummy would be - shock horror - naked!

It was company policy not to expose the sensitive Wycombe shoppers to the sight of unclothed shop mannequins.

Staff were instructed only to change/remove clothes after the shop was closed and even then to take the dummy to the back of the shop to avoid passers-by pressing their noses against the window for a furtive glimpse of provocative dummy nudity.

When my wife and daughter recovered from the experience of their jaws hitting the deck in disbelief at the very idea of such a ludicrous manifestation of the nanny culture that is destroying this country, they left before they could be overcome by the desire to rip the clothes of all the mannequins in the shop.

But that's not all.

A friend told us that a coffee shop in Oxford that he visited regularly had recently changed its displayed list of the now seemingly endless variations on a cup of coffee.

He could no longer see black coffee on the menu and enquired why.

In fact it was. But now, apparently, you have to ask for white coffee without the milk.

Yes you've guessed. For fear of causing offence!

But we live in a world where men in balaclavas and gloves are found on a church roof in Yorkshire, with lead rolled up nearby and are not charged with any offence because police couldn't prove that it wasn't just a coincidence and they were simply admiring the view.

Perhaps it's easier to catch people on camera doing 35mph and issue them with fixed penalties.