When I decide where to take my grandchildren out for the day I do not look for a beach with a Blue Flag award.

What matters most to me are the facilities which are available to entertain the children, for example donkey rides or a Punch and Judy show.

I was brought up in an age when there were no scientists patrolling beaches with a test tube looking for “one bug in so many million”.

Pollution was far greater in those days, with sewage water being pumped straight into the Thames, both locally and upstream in London, but it never did us kids any harm. In fact we were, perhaps, fitter and more resilient than modern- day children, maybe because we had built up a natural resistance.

I am not suggesting we go back to those days, but it is time the “health and safety”

brigade stopped dominating our lives with their petty rules and our children are given their lives back.

Let the donkeys on to the beach, I say. They could be allocated a taped-off area on one of the beaches, if necessary in a spot where tides could wash the sand. I am sure any health risk would be next to nothing.

What will be next? A ban on toddlers in case they tiddle in the sea?

Sandra Jones
Tankerville Drive
Leigh

...All this fuss over blue flags and donkey doings down at the beach, what’s it all about?

Does anyone really care less if a beach has been awarded a certain superior status over neighbouring normal ones?

Curiously the removal of the Blue Flag from the Three Shells Beach comes in the same week that Southend Council bans a woman and her donkeys from giving rides to kiddies thereabouts because of the possibility they may defecate on the sand thereby causing a health hazard to the skin cancer oblivious sun worshippers!

So what of all the other donkey ride businesses around our coastline and the other less sniffy local authorities that accept them as an ideal fun seaside attraction?

Has it ever been proved that donkey dung and urine has a detrimental effect on human health?

I seem to remember old Uncle Fred said he helped to tend the donkeys on Southend seafront with his sister when they were kids, probably in the 1920s and walking them back up Chalkwell Avenue to their stables somewhere off the London Road.

I presume the day trippers enjoyed themselves despite the donkey’s presence and absence of blue flags, but perhaps they were a tougher lot back then?

As far as I can see, Jo Public faces far greater health’n’safety perils nowadays with the new brilliantly thought out askew parking arrangements and ludicrous cycle track than they ever did back then.

But I guess when you’ve been through a war to end all wars, what’s a scruffy beach and a heap of useful dung between friends when you need to feed the rhubarb?

Trevor Murdin
Flemming Crescent
Leigh