WARNING: Reading this column could seriously damage your health.

Don’t blame me if your blood pressure goes soaring off the scale when you realise the futility of hoping for any sense of real people’s priorities from our leaders.

Here are a couple of extracts from one of Wiltshire Council’s latest press releases. As a patronising statement of the bleeding obvious it takes some beating.

“Wiltshire Council and NHS Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group are reminding people that excessive drinking in a short space of time can have lasting damaging effects.

“People are advised to limit the total amount of alcohol in one session.

“Most people enjoy a sensible social drink without it having any negative effect but at times lots of people will go out for a good time and have a few more drinks than they’re used to.”

Oh, really? You don’t say! And this press release, reported in a single column on Page 22 of last week’s Journal, will make a difference!

But there’s more to come.

I can’t wait for the next instalment of the Stay Well This Summer campaign, which promises to highlight “summerrelated issues” including “safe outdoor eating”, and “protecting yourself from excessively high temperatures”.

What’ll that be, then? “Keep those pesky flies off your sandwiches!” “Be careful if you’re picnicking on chicken satay: those sticks are sharp!” And “Don’t believe those adverts that tell you a suntan looks sexy.”

Followed by – wait for it – Wiltshire’s Obesity Strategy. Targets include “halting the rise of excess weight” in children and adults by 2020.

How are they going to achieve that, short of shutting down every fast food outlet, delivering veg boxes to deprived families and sending half the county on a cookery course?

It would be hilarious, if only this pious pie-in-the-sky wasn’t being issued at our expense by an authority that pleads poverty when charging charities to use the tip.

You could be forgiven for thinking that we paid our council tax and parking charges so we could have useful stuff like a youth service, a children’s centre in every town, household recycling facilities open at sensible hours.

But no, all this comes under the nebulous label of Public Health, a responsibility the government passed on to councils just as everyone realised there was No Money for anything else.

It’s a relatively cheap way to look as if you’re doing something worthwhile.

And as Wiltshire shuffles off all the boring toilet maintenance that it can no longer afford onto our humble parish, having flogged our CCTV building and pocketed the proceeds, it all helps keep the empire in business.

Large glass of red, anybody? Cheers.

anneriddle36@gmail.com