Bath taps

One of the minor irritations of travelling is the way in which every hotel seems to have its own way of doing its bath taps. At every new hotel one has to learn how to work the bath all over again, sometimes getting scalded in the process. With the present hotel in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, having particularly unusual bath taps.

Against which background it is unfortunate that we are pulling out of the EU, and hotels in the UK will not have to comply with the Bath Taps Directive which is being cooked up by the Commission's Executive Agency for Consumers, Health, Agriculture and Food, under the supervision of the Directorate General for Health and Food Safety. Commissioner Andriukaitis (a former heart surgeon from Lithuania) is on the case. At least he understands the benefits of standardisation, for example the benefits that the standard 13 amp plug, as used here in the UK, might have brought to the world, had the standards people been a bit quicker off the blocks.

Perhaps our Foreign Secretary always has an aide going on ahead to get the hang of the bath taps at his hotels before he turns up, with the result that he has never had to bother his head about them.