Dear Mary: Help! Wet wipes keep blocking the drains at our caravan park

Q. My sister and I own a popular caravan park which, for 30 years, has given happiness to around a hundred caravan owners a week. Over the past three years, however, our small profit has turned into a loss due to the craze for wet wipes, by which I mean facial cleansing wipes and baby wipes. They block the drains and cost us £7,000 every five months in cesspit rebuilding costs. No amount of pleading to the punters not to put them down the loos has any effect. As a consequence we are going to have to close the park unless, Mary, you can think of a solution?
— Name and address withheld

A. Money talks, so why not catch the punters’ attention by advertising a 10 per cent discount for those caravan owners who will sign a legally binding agreement not to bring the blocking type of wet wipes to the site? These punters must agree to a searching protocol. Contrast this with a 20 per cent ‘freedom to block’ surcharge for those who want to continue using the wipes, alongside an agreement to be personally liable for the cesspit-rebuilding costs appertaining to DNA-sampled wipes which can be traced to their own bottoms or faces. Forcing them to think about these issues will soon bring the punters to their senses.


Q. My graduate godson has been trying to find work for two years without success. He is just sitting around in Clapham all day gaming. Now he thinks he would like to set up a bungee-jumping operation in Nepal as he saw from his gap year experiences that this would be a definite goer — and he has asked me to fund the operation. Not only do I dislike the risk factor, but it seems a bit of a slacker option to me.