CHARLES GRAHAM - Setting a terrifyingly bad example

I get clammy hands just looking at those pictures of youngsters larking around on top of the Pagefield Building chimney.

Last week we featured a particularly alarming picture of one swanky youth who climbed over the railings and dangled by one hand 196ft above the ground.

It meant that once again efforts to seal off these death trap premises from intruders have failed. A local councillor wants the whole place demolished and I wouldn’t be averse to that happening. Or at least remove the ladder up the chimney’s interior that can clearly still be scaled all too easily.

A reader collared one of the recent offenders who said he was proud of his death-defying feats, claiming he was confident that he wouldn’t come a cropper because he knew what he was doing.

He did say that he wouldn’t recommend that other people try what he was doing but that was because if some “idiot” fell and was killed, then he would get the blame for it.

Very true, but he should also realise that impressionable youngsters seeing his antics might be tempted to follow fatally in his footsteps anyway.