Whitby is a very popular day trip and holiday destination for Yorkshire, Teesside and Humberside (and parts beyond).  Mr Beeching, who I hope is enduring the worst torments of hell, hacked the train links to Whitby so most people get here by car: between easter and October it varies from very busy to gridlocked.

For a decade North Yorkshire County Council have been trying to provide a park and ride scheme. The problem is very serious - as a coastal town with a river dividing the town, road access is limited and in spring and summer locals and visitors alike find driving and parking impossible.

A park and ride is a no-brainer, sadly our planning authority seems to be in negative cereballar equity . Having overcome local problems, the Council submitted the plans to the unelected, unaccountable North Yorkshire Moors National Park Authority. They turned it down.

Thanks to these distant bureaucrats and appointed councillors, more concerned with heather and a pretty view than the health and economic welfare of the residents of one of the most historically significant and beautiful towns in England, we are now condemned to another indeterminate period of choked streets, summer gridlock an utter inconvenience to the lives of locals.

Founded in 1952, National Parks are a hangover from an era a big state regulation and should be reformed - reduced to a conservation organization and their planning powers stripped and returned to the democratically elected local authorities.

Just for information, here we are governed by:
Hinderwell Parish Council
Scarborough Borough Council
North Yorkshire County Council
North Yorkshire Moors National Park Authority

Yes, that's four levels of local authority government.

An MP
Six MEPs
Plus Yorkshire Forward and the Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Assembly

Are we adequately governed yet?

He had been the doctor for a woman with a low IQ (95) who got in with the wrong crowd and produced two children. Social services - this was in the south of England - wanted the children away and adopted. The Doctor objected: his patient loved her children, wanted to keep them, could cook, kept the house, them and their clothes clean, exposed them to no risk. She was a good, if unintelligent mother. He put on The Manner.

Social services folded, but, as he said, 'left her a weeping and broken young woman and got in their newly registered cars and drove away.' Ouch. He was then 'persona non grata' with social services.

That's the second vulnerable young woman left weeping and upset by social services I've heard of in the last six months.

Well done, big people. (The Doc also said that there is a new generation of doctors coming into the profession without the backbone to stand up to social workers where necessary.)

Speechless, really. These killjoys are legislating and regulating the joy out of life. Shame on Harrogate Borough Council.

Strangely enough, the MPs Parliamentary pancake race went ahead unimpeded by health and safety regs, needs for first aiders or police to close the road at a coast of £250. At a time when divers MPs have been found to be less than honourable in their financial dealings, they need to be careful at the growing perception that it's one set of rules for them - our ruling class - and another us. I've been involved in politics all my adult life, and have never known a time when politicians have been held in such widespread distrust or contempt.

I am told a former Whitby harbour berthing manager (and very experienced sailor) used to post notices around the marina when he considered it unsafe to go to sea.

He was told to stop this by Scarborough Borough Council because it 'exposed them to potential liability'.

(Insert insult of choice here - a long portmanteau insult of withering unsurpassible contempt seems apt.)

As yesterdays tragedy shows, you cannot stop people being stupid, but you can in the light of experience advise them against it.

More eyewitnessery: they crew were seen struggling to fit life jackets as the boat got into trouble (disbelief). Whitby Lifeboat was scrambled as soon as it was observed that the cruiser was heading out of the harbour (very good call by someone). Three VHF calls to tell them to turn round were not answered, and the woman aboard made a 999 call which lasted 4 or 5 minutes as the lifeboat headed out of the harbour. Her male companions had (it seemed) been washed overboard. According to the Yorkshire Post her last words were 'Oh my God' then nothing.

This suggests they either didn't have a VHF or didn't know how to use it in an emergency (I am not surprised by this: I know many motorboat owners do not have VHFs or the basic knowledge to use them, relying on mobiles if they get into trouble). The cruiser was a Bayliner, very light at the bows and with a heavy engine at the stern: it would have been uncontrollable in those conditions and stood on its stern by the breaking waves across the harbour entrance. If the crew were not clipped with a safety line from their lifejacked harness to a d-ring or jacksay when that happened, it would be all over.

The seas were so heavy that even the Whitby lifeboat (a damn great big thing - Trent Class - with twin 1000 hp diesels) dared not risk turning across the waves, and had to manouvre into the rescue by staying bow to the waves while the heroic crew stood at the rails and used long hooks on poles to snag and recover the two casualties (the third was taken from the water by a SAR helicopter). The Lifeboat skipper's actions sounds like one of the bravest, most skillful acts of seamanship on this coast in a long time.

I sail out of that harbour, I've done about 15,000 miles at sea (much of it in very dirty weather in the North Sea) and thinking about the terror that those three people suffered in the last few minutes of their lives in those waves kept me awake last night.

Their Social Services department certainly are in my lengthy, torrid experience.

So we started a rumour (it wasn't difficult). If perp carried on like this one night a few men would jump him, bag him, tie him and lob him in a truck. After being driven around in the dark for a while, a few bumps, a few sharp bends, he'd be dumped outside the village, somewhere wet, distant and unnervingly dark, a goodly walk home on a road where a lift would be unlikely.

The vandalism has strangely ceased. Thanks for nothing, Police.

I was all for the Roman method, hurling him in the river tied up in a sack with a rooster, a dog and a cat, but John at the garage said the RSPCA might object.

I think that's one funny slogan, and I don't want to live in a society where some maggot eating bureaucrat can tell a citizen how he does or does not exercise free speech. I spit me of Peterborough City Council. £80?

Wear your t-shirt with pride, Mr Pratt. I'll dob a tenner in for your fine. Print more, sell 'em. Cause your shower of a council a collective nervous breakdown. Up with this shit we should not put.

H/t Freerangeacademy.