Among the usual Bank Holiday festivities of social gatherings, gardening and facing more barbecued food than you can shake a ketchup bottle at, a few friends and I took a drive through Bisterne. Nothing too unusual in that, but at this time of year Bisterne holds a scarecrow festival.

The scarecrow festival is another of those fantastic traditions that typifies, and sometimes stereotypes, typically English villages.

Residents of the village have free reign to create their own scarecrow, or scarecrows, to display outside their home, putting a smile on the faces of people driving by and perhaps securing one of the judging panel's rosettes.

However, these aren't all the kind of scarecrows you'd see standing guard over a field groaning with sweetcorn. There was Bart Simpson, for example. One house had a splendid show jumping scene taking place while another had a superbly crafted Clanger that had caught the judges' eyes, not to mention the Gromit scarecrow trying to catch a pesky were-rabbit.

The road through Bisterne and the surrounding area was scattered generously with cars parked awkwardly on grass verges as people as curious as we were went to get a closer look and snap a couple of photos.

Passing a church with a fantastic angel hanging from a tree outside, one of our friends made a comment about whether or not the villagers had to carry out a risk assessment before siting their creations.

Although this was said in jest, the way things are at the moment, it wouldn't be a massive stretch to imagine a pencil-necked bureaucrat in an ill-fitting polyester suit insisting, palm-top and stylus in hand, that your effigy of Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver could cause a pedestrian to stop and admire it. This would cause a blockage on a public highway and also carry the risk of death should a freak wind blow Travis Bickle onto the admirer and so the scarecrow would have to be removed.

Maybe that sounds a bit ridiculous but then again, so does banning conkers in the playground on health and safety grounds and stopping school sports days because the losers in a race may get upset.

I'm willing to bet that the majority of the people coming up with regulations like this are the ones who got nosebleeds while putting on their plimsolls for PE.

I don't want to spout a tiresome: "We didn't have any of this PC rubbish when I was a lad and I turned out alright" rant so I won't. I will, however, point out that when I, and many people of a similar age were at school, we were actively encouraged to be competitive during sporting activities. We were encouraged to do well in tests and we were suitably punished if we got out of line.

Residents supported community events such as carnivals and other kinds of traditional festivals, and even the people who didn't participate directly still attended as a family.

And in all those years, neither my friends, family or I can ever recall a child being robbed, stabbed or shot by another child.

I can also pretty much guarantee that had an event as tragic as the shooting of Rhys Jones last week happened back then, nobody would have the nerve to put the murder of an 11 year old boy down to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yep. The heath and safety brigade are doing a bang up job of removing the danger from childhood. You never hear of people being blinded by conkers or crushed by scarecrows anymore.