We’ve mentioned before that detailed planning leads to certain problems. Another little example here.

Wet wipes and ketchup sachets could be banned in England under plans to tackle plastic pollution, the Government will announce today.

Well, yes, sachets for sauces, vile things. Stick a multiuse bottle of something on the table, a far better idea. Except:

The European Commission is to ban the use of refillable bottles and dipping bowls of olive oil at restaurant tables from next year.

From 1 January 2014, restaurants may only serve olive oil in tamper-proof packaging, labelled to EU standards.

Tamper proof is a synonym, of course it is, for single use and single portion servings.

We could mutter something about it only being olive oil that the EU is talking about but no, that’s not in fact true. Or perhaps that this is the glory of Brexit, that we can switch from one insistence to another.

But we’d point to that problem with detailed rule making. The material of choice for a small single serving of sauce is going to be a plastic of some sort. By definition it’s single use. Insistence upon single portion serving is insistence upon plastic. That detailed planning then leaves us with this problem - how do we have single serving sauces without the only rational packaging for single serving sauces?

Or perhaps clipboard wielders in comfy offices should stop trying to determine how society ketchups its chips and get on with something useful? Like, perhaps, not being clipboard wielders in comfy offices?

We hear that there are hungry who need feeding, homeless requiring shelter, even the naked who need clothing. All tasks where human labour could more usefully be directed perhaps? Although, given our own opinions on the usefulness of those who currently govern from their comfy offices this will leave all of us starving, freezing and out in the open.