IT would do credit to a Monty Python episode...council workmen going about mowing down daffodils in droves -- sometimes even before they have flowered.

And the reason for this? Well, the blooming things are growing, aren't they?

Saner sorts might, of course, ask why, if they need cutting down once they appear, they were planted in the council's grass verges to begin with.

But business and the thinking behind this is more than a nonsense -- it is a violation that, rightly, tars Blackburn with Darwen Council as heartless vandals. For annual daffodil displays on roadsides across the borough -- much of it originated at considerable public expense in job-creation schemes, incidentally -- is more than a free flower show.

It is a splendid event that tells us Spring is here at long last -- an all-too-short spectacle that lifts the spirits; tells us that winter is over and warmer days are ahead. It is a symbol of Nature's seasonal renewal and makes us all feel good. It is little wonder that one of our finest poets was moved to rapture by the sight of a host of golden daffodils nodding in the breeze.

And that's why it makes so many angry when along comes a chap with a grass-cutter, blithely mowing them down and saying he is only doing what he has been told.

And what he has been told is that in order for the bulbs to flower next time, the stalks need to be left uncut for as long as six or eight weeks -- during which time the grass around the bulb gets long and some people complain that it looks unsightly. So for the improvement of visual amenity, the council feels obliged to destroy another, more beautiful one --and one which was initiated as a public work and public expense.

This is purely Pythonesque and the explanation for it just as absurd. What is wrong, after all, with grass verges looking untended for weeks on end -- when the common experience is that it is council policy for such a situation to prevail at all times of the year?

What a bloomer!