Kindly Postpone Your Illness

If you are planning to fall ill in Marmande, please choose another town.In September, Mayor Joël Hocquelet issued an order banning illness to protest threatened cuts to local hospital care. The town hall openly calls the order symbolic. Nobody is going to arrest you for sneezing.

Still, it is a bold approach to waiting lists. Cannot get a doctor? Stop needing one.

You can picture the letter. “Dear Sir, your appendix has burst during a period of reduced staffing. Please put it back.”

Marmande is deliberately making a point. The trouble is that plenty of other places have written strange rules without intending a joke.

Please bring proof

In Utah, bars and taverns must check and scan everyone’s ID before entry, however old they look. The rule also helps identify people barred from buying alcohol. Even so, a 94-year-old can have children older than the bartender and still need to find her card.

“Old enough to be your grandmother” remains an unapproved form of identification.

In Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, certain high heels require a permit. It is free, and police do not issue tickets. The rule protects the town from lawsuits over falls on uneven pavements.

The city has found a way to make going out in high heels even more painful: stop at City Hall first. You may have the dress, the reservation and the babysitter. Your ankles are awaiting approval.

South Korea offered a better deal. In 2023, an age-counting reform made people one or two years younger compared with traditional “Korean age”. Under that system, you were one at birth and gained another year every 1 January. A baby born on New Year’s Eve could be two by breakfast, despite having achieved nothing beyond a full nappy.

The reform made age counted from birthdays the standard for legal documents, with some exceptions. For once, getting older had turned out to be an administrative error.

The fish would like a lawyer

Britain’s Salmon Act 1986 has a section headed “Handling fish in suspicious circumstances”. It concerns fish believed, or reasonably suspected, to have been illegally caught or traded. A sensible purpose. A magnificent title.

You picture an interview room, a salmon on the table and a detective asking where it was on Tuesday night.

The fish says nothing. It knows its rights.

In Kentucky, the constitutional oath for public officials and lawyers includes swearing that they have not fought duels with deadly weapons while Kentucky citizens. Your lawyer may still ruin you. He just has to use his invoice.

China has taken the paperwork beyond the grave. Its 2007 rules on recognising reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist leaders, known as “living Buddhas”, require government approval. A certificate is issued when the recognised leader is installed.

You can picture the clerk asking for a date of birth. “This time or last time?”

Imagine making it all the way back from the dead, only to be told to come back on Monday.

And now home

Before anyone in Antigua starts feeling superior, check your shorts.

Under the Defence Act, wearing military camouflage without authority is an offence. Camouflage was invented to help people avoid attention. In Antigua, it works in reverse.

This rule still has teeth: police reported arrests involving camouflage clothing in Liberta this August.

But our strongest entry is the Obeah Act, a colonial law dating from 1904 that still appears in the country’s law books. Its authors took a dim view of spells and left detailed instructions.

Section 7 reaches the customer, too. Under the Act’s text, consulting an obeah practitioner to bring about an event through occult or supernatural means can mean a fine of up to EC$3,000 or up to a year in prison.

“I wasn’t doing the magic. I just placed the order” is therefore a poor defence.

How often this old provision is enforced is another question. The joke is in the statute: ask someone to make your problems disappear, and it has arranged for you to have a new one.

Which brings us back to Marmande. The mayor asks you not to get ill. Antigua’s Obeah Act has something to say about hiring supernatural help to get better. Put the two together and you have a health service where the doctor is unavailable and the backup plan needs a defence lawyer.

Please remain well until further notice.