You'll like this one, dear sane reader. A young lady friend took some children into a pub in Marlow for lunch.

One of the children wanted a baked potato with cold baked beans. A simple enough request, you would have thought. However, my friend was told that Health and Safety Regulations (sigh!) meant that they were unable to serve cold baked beans, but could only offer hot baked beans which the child did not like.

My friend, who patently has a lot more patience than I would have done in similar circumstances, gently enquired whether it might be possible, having heated the baked beans, to pop them in the fridge for a while.

Not being there, I am not sure whether the waiter had to check through the Health and Safety Baked Bean Temperature Control Inspectorate Regulations, but he agreed.

As is implicit in the actual name of this food, the beans are actually cooked already, so the litigation busting effect of heating them up is lost on me.

Maybe a reader who has their finger on the pulse (and beans are pulses aren't they?) could explain this nonsense to me.

The same friend returned to her home recently to find that some young men had encamped in her garden in order to drink and smoke and generally enjoy what her herbaceous borders had to offer.

When she asked them what they were doing there and requested that they leave, they simply stared at her without speaking and carried on doing what they were doing before climbing back over the fence a little while later.

Meanwhile she had telephoned the police, who asked her if the intruders into her garden had damaged any property in gaining access. They hadn't. They had simply climbed over her sturdy six-foot fence. As there was no damage, the police were unable to help.

Trespass is a civil matter and unless there is damage or threatening behaviour, the police are powerless to act to protect a young woman, living alone, from the random incursion from louts who know the law well enough to know what they can do with impunity.

My friend, who is now contemplating moving house as a result of this unwelcome and newly discovered vulnerability, asked the police if it would be OK to run barbed wire along the top of her fence.

And, as you have probably already guessed, no it isn't.

An uninvited intruder, it seems, has more rights than the citizen in their own home.

If anybody in local or national government is reading this column, will they please do something, anything, to tip the see-saw back in the direction of the citizen and away from the thug, the criminal and the sociopath who are currently using every loophole in our inadequate criminal legislation to cock an insolent snook at the rest of us.