HOW many pencils are chewed in the corridors of power in finding directives to issue to the long suffering populace?

The latest government-backed booklet calling for the banning of the party game musical chairs, which it suggests causes children to be aggressive, takes the biscuit.

Children need scope and room to develop and grow -- also to be competitive.

They forget children do live a fantasy life on occasions.

Many times in my childhood, I held off Red Indians, receiving "wounds" and staging a fall worthy of an Oscar on my way home from the cinema.

England would never have had world standing, an empire or defeated dictators and tyrants without the foresight, ingenuity and, yes, aggression which is in every child, something this booklet seeks to suppress.

K SOWERBUTTS, Southwood Drive, Baxenden.