THE Members of Parliament, having just voted themselves a £4,000 pay rise plus higher expenses, have gone away for their three-months holiday. And now we are at the start of what is known as the silly season. There is certainly plenty of scope for silliness.

For example, I might have spent the week looking for a lost undertaker if I had taken a newspaper billboard at face value: Lost Undertaker's Van. In the same way, I might have been stuck forever at the bottom of the escalator and looking for a dog in Marks and Spencer if I had taken seriously the sign which said: Dogs Must Be Carried. These are the sorts of little games with words and meanings which delight small children. I remember taking ours on day trips to the seaside and, of course, entering a traffic jam after the first ten miles or so. This is when they get fractious and ask: "Are we there yet?". Try answering: "No, and we'll never be there because, since we can't be in two places at once, where we are is always here!" That sends the children into deep thought and, with luck, silence.

Nigel Rees has produced a collection of amusing ambiguities in his Dictionary of Anecdotes. He tells of a notice outside a fish and chip shop which says: "Cleanliness, economy and civility, always hot and always ready. To which a passer-by replied: "This sounds like the motto for the perfect wife." When PT Barnum, the showman, found that people were hanging around for too long at his museum, he put up a notice saying: To The Egress. Most visitors thought that this referred to some exotic creature and so they eagerly went the way the sign pointed them - only to find themselves out in the street.

People can't resist adding their own comments to notices. See all those To Let signs turned into Toilet. Thomas Watson, founder of the computer company IBM, put up a sign in all his offices urging his staff to Think. Someone wrote under it: Or Thwim. Wit prevails in even the most desperate locations: on the wall of a Foreign Legion barracks in Algeria, the medical officer had inscribed the slogan: Alcohol Kills Slowly. A soldier scribbled under it: "I'm in no hurry".

At Idle, near Bradford, there used to be a noticeboard advertising the Idle Working Men's Club which is almost as misleading (perhaps!) as that in the village of Loose in Kent: Loose Women's Institute.

One of the best taxi cab notices must be: Smoking Permitted. Thank You For Not Jogging. During the Second World War, a parish priest in Putney erected a new statue of the Virgin Mary and decided to call it Our Lady Of Putney. But the Bishop said the notice would be a breach of national security. "For, if invading Germans see the statue, they will be able to tell where they are." So, the pedestal bears the inscription: Our Lady Of Hereabouts.

Surely a notice should give useful information? There is a sign outside the Guildhall here in London that says: Beware Of Pedestrians - and I can't help reading it to make the same sense as: Beware Of The Dog. Then, you know where you are with: Danger Men At Work, but what are we to make of: Low Flying Aircraft? What are we supposed to do - duck?

Years ago, David Frost told the story of what must be the most useless notice of all time. Apparently, on the Yorkshire Moors there was a sign which said simply: It Is Forbidden To Throw Stones At This Notice. The car park outside York District Hospital has a cautionary notice by the entrance warning visitors: Beware: Thieves Operate In This Car Park. To which, an appropriately thankful reply might be: "I'm glad the surgeons don't!"

Published: Tuesday, July 3, 2001