Christmas Eve...and at the frozen North Pole, Santa Claus piles presents for everyone aboard his sleigh and prepares to head south, spreading joy and happiness in his wake.

This year, however, he has as his Little Helper - your Lancashire Evening Telegraph - charged with the pleasant task of whispering last-minute wishes in the old man's ear - so that when he obliges with their fulfilment, Christmas, 1997, will be truly special.

For mindful of how so many gifts - the socks, boxed handkerchiefs, bath salts, home-knitted jumpers and so forth - have a tendency to elicit from their recipients the words: "Not again!", the Little Helper from the Telegraph, going by the soubriquet of Th' Owd Pink, has a special mission.

It is to replace this all-too-common Christmas chagrin with pleasant surprise - and, more than that, of bringing lasting satisfaction and improvement to the lot of as many as possible.

For Th' Owd Pink, as will be known to those who read the observations that are compounded here daily into his venerable Opinion, is a carer for the community and social commentator who would make life better wherever he could. And so, privy to the wishes he whispers this night, we discover just how the quality of life could be improved....

First, for the sake of the lost and confused, he wishes for the gift of straight-edged rulers for the people in the Blackburn town hall roads planning office so that they may at last draw direct lines from A to B and discard their model of the Hampton Court Maze on which they base their one-way town-centre traffic systems - and so that travellers to the railway station may finally find where it is. Next, for the benefit of East Lancashire's harassed shopkeepers, having seen the roving robotic vacuum cleaner that was unveiled this year, he wishes for a similar device to be incorporated in their 'A-board' advertising signs - with the effect that, at the approach of an official wielding a copy of the Highways Act, 1980, proscribing display of the same, the board can automatically scoot safely indoors, issuing raspberry-blowing noises on the way.

Then, mindful of the glut of telly that has to be somehow stored on magnetic tape at this time of year, he expresses his profound desire for the invention of video cassette recording machines that can be worked and understood by adults and not just children under five - though he realises this is asking a lot of technology.

Further, for the joy of the faithful followers of Blackburn Rovers and for the particular and further delight of the sterling Mr Stuart Ripley and in order to disabuse the notion that what is seldom is wonderful, he asks that FIFA might dust off and enact the plan it had for making the goals bigger.

And, by contrast, in view of the want for assistance of this nature and the concomitant dispelling of gloom and rancour at the other end of East Lancashire, he wishes that the goals towards which the Clarets' opponents are kicking be generously shrunk - the need, after all, is great.

Yet, lastly, and seriously, he wishes for all our readers to have a safe and happy Christmas.

Merry Christmas!

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.