Pied Piper, I quite agree. Sometimes, I seem to find officialdom prefer to maintain the sometimes archaic or arcane letter of the law against those who are uncomplaining and law-abiding, rather than address proper issues of public safety or morals.

A pub near me has recently had a near-sqeak with PEL's; the licensing authorities were objecting even to an unamplified session involving four folk instrumentalist, and went to the extent of sending the Police round on the night of a cancelled gig, to make sure that an unlicensed session wasn't taking place. [By the way, the Boys in Blue were very polite and sympathetic about having to turn up.] The pub is now running under a probationary entertainments license. The purpose of the probationary period seems to me to be little more than bluster, designed to make sure that we know who is boss.

To be fair, a complaint had been made about noise by a nearby resident, but it was easy to prove that this was without foundation, if not actually frivolous.

Meanwhile, nearby clubs which are quite shocking shebeens dedicated to making youths drunk and penniless as quickly as possible, are allowed to remain open unchecked, in spite of noise, brawls and (in one case) a drugs raid which netted several hard drugs. Just along the road, two pubs a few yards apart operate competing karaoke machines. On busy nights, the noise is somewhere between awful and cacophonic.

I wrote a letter to the licensing authorities pointing out the above fact, which just stopped short of accusing them of moral cowardice and hypocrisy. I await a knock on the door at three in the morning...