WE couldn't wait to get rid of Bolton's Wakes Weeks, could we?

Well, how wrong we were. The warnings were always there, mostly from those at the sharp end in local schools who had spotted that losing the Bolton Holiday Fortnight would mean more expensive holidays for local families, and the temptation to take children out of school in term-time.

Now, the Government wants such erring parents to be fined, when a bit of Northern nouse would have saved it all.

Those long-awaited Wakes Weeks, which gave local mills and other big employers like engineering companies a chance to shut down for a couple of weeks for employees to have an annual break, gave thousands of parents cheap holidays at off-peak times.

OK, so you had a reasonable chance of sharing your beach spot with a near neighbour from home, but that was the gamble.

The system worked well, but "progress" decreed that it should change.

As reader Ainslie Casson pointed out in an excellent letter in this newspaper, we are being led to believe that parents who now take their children out of school are uncaring.

But the real root of the problem, he stated, lay in short-sightedness by officialdom and "the change for change sake merchants and the 'yes men' subservient towards a Southern-facing Government."

It's just a pity that we cannot take a step back in time, and re-introduce the old Wakes Weeks. Yes, they're outdated. Yes, firms don't really need to shut down the manufacturing processes anymore.

But, they brought an element to local life that encouraged family life, home and away.

Now that must count for something.