DEBATE nights at Beggarsdale WI are getting livelier by the month these days: I think the lasses are trying to compete in notoriety with those Rylstone ladies who stripped off for a calendar and became world famous.

So to stir up a bit of controversy, the ladies held a Pet Hate Debate the other night and invited we lads to join them.

If anyone thought the Age of Steam was dead, they should have been there: super-heated clouds of the stuff nearly took the roof off.

People were given just three minutes to list their pet hates and the audience was allowed another five to say why their hates were worse than the speaker's hates. Sometimes, it got pretty personal.

The commonest complaints from the ladies were about snoring husbands which, I suppose, is to be expected.

All sorts of remedies were suggested, from pillows across the face to a new sort of medical noseband that no one had tried.

Teacher Tess got a laugh by admitting that her husband had once gone to the Doc complaining about pains in his side.

Only then did Tess admit that she regularly elbowed poor sleeping Tim in the side to stop his snores!

But the Hate of the Year came from an unusual source, Ben the Bucket's sister, Beatrice, who never says much in private, never mind in public before all her friends and neighbours.

Beatrice was clearly distressed and when we heard her story, we understood why: cash is very tight for the two of them ever since Ben was made redundant when the quarry closed.

With great trepidation, Beatrice explained that she had cadged a lift into Mar'ton with the vicar - there hasn't been a bus service these past 15 years - so that she could go to the building society and withdraw some cash to pay her Christmas bills.

When she got back to the village, she found she had lost one of the new leather gloves that Ben had bought her for Christmas.

Thinking back, she remembered taking it off to sign her name at the building society.

Now Ben and Beatrice cannot afford a telephone, so she went to the kiosk by the post office with a big pile of change and began to dial the Mar'ton branch.

To her surprise, she found she could no longer do that: all calls had to go through some central office miles away.

As Beatrice told the WI: "When I eventually got through to there, some machine told me to press button one for this, button two for that, and button three for the other.

"When I eventually got through to a human being, he said they didn't have a system that dealt with lost property.

"By that time, I'd run out of change so I had to get a taxi to Mar'ton to get the glove: I daren't tell Ben I'd lost it so soon. It cost me the best part of £20."

She tailed off and we knew why. But her entry to the debate - in other words, automated telephone answering systems - proved to be the most hated subject of the night by such a huge margin that the committee voted her a £25 first prize.

Funnily enough, no one even knew that prizes were to be awarded that night...

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.