THE miseries, it seems, are still calling the tune over the popular pensioners' dances that they have stopped at Burnley because they fall foul of the cobwebbed 200-year-old Sunday observance law.

For council officials, who last month brought down this silly old ordinance on the scores of old folk who had been enjoying a weekly Sunday tea dance at Barden High School for seven years, are still at it.

Now, they have forced them to shift their Christmas celebration to a Thursday.

Well, in whirls Burnley MP Peter Pike to say what a nonsense it is - and with a scheme to get the law changed.

That will take time. But Home Secretary Jack Straw ought to give Mr Pike's plan an immediate nod as he hopes that government commitment to amend this daft, outdated law might cause the council to lift the ban in the interim.

And so they should anyway. It's not the council's duty to make old folk unhappy. And especially not at Christmas.

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