SITTING in a nice warm rain forest in Australia for a few weeks and doing nothing very much except pose around for the benefit of a reality television show doesn't appear to be much of an endurance test to me.

Why not bring things closer to home and stage a more arduous test of character by setting a show in the middle of cold and dank Grizedale Forest?

After all, we already have on our doorsteps a whole bunch of would-be celebrities who I am sure would be keen to be incarcerated in the forest for the sake of some small screen exposure in I Am A Councillor, Get Me Out Of Here.

The essential difference would be that instead of voting them out for poor performance, long-suffering Council Tax payers would vote to keep them in.

They could be set entertaining tasks such as building a public loo out of natural materials then selling it off for re-developement, or painting double yellow lines along the edge of every forest footpath.

MEDIEVAL VICTIMS...

I FEEL great sympathy for the Coniston couple featured in last week's Gazette who face a £20,000 bill because the Lake District National Park Authority has ordered them to remove plastic windows because they are "an inappropriate rep-lacement and would erode the traditional character and appearance of buildings within the national park."

They are, however, neither the first nor, I suspect, the last victims of the LDNPA's determination to preserve the Lake District as a medieval museum.

Some years ago an Ambleside resident wanted to replace the door on his house, mainly because it was so old that it was sagging and there were huge, draughty, gaps round the edge of the frame.

Unfortunately for him he lived in a listed building and planners turned the application down flat, saying that the old oak door was part of the original fabric of the building and must stay.

He was fairly upset by the decision, but said philosophically: "Well at least the previous owners had the foresight to put in a bathroom many years ago, otherwise the planners would probably have insisted that we continued to use the old earth closet at the bottom of the garden."

PAINTED PUZZLE...

NEW paint jobs on the Eddie Stobbart lorries have created a road hazard, says a friend.

All the firm's lorries have a woman's name on the front and for years parents have kept children amused on long motorway journeys by getting them to collect the names.

"The trouble is that the names used to be in big writing, now it is much smaller and the danger is that parents will swerve in too quickly so that the kids can still read them," he said, adding: "I used to play the game with my kids when they were small.

"I told them I would give them £5 if they got more than 35, but they never did because as soon as they got close I would turn off the motorway and use other roads instead."

BAGPIPE HORROR...

WALKING down Stricklandgate in the teeming rain under leaden skies and halfdark midday conditions at the height of last week's downpour, my ears were suddenly hit by the wail of a busking bagpiper sheltering under the Finkle Street birdcage just the thing to put the seal on the scene of abject misery which can be Kendal in mid-winter.