Wooden caterpillar holding ornamental shisha pipe in florist's window sparked council alert

A wooden caterpillar ‘smoking’ an unlit shisha pipe in a Blackburn shop window sparked a council alert. An over eager environmental health officer who visited Ewood Florist said the display item fell foul of anti-smoking laws. He told owner Debbie Schofield the caterpillar may be breaching laws preventing employees from smoking in the workplace. Debbie said she was astonished when questioned about the Alice in Wonderland inspired display.



She said: “He told me he’d come in to investigate because there had been a complaint that the shisha pipe was contravening UK smoking in the workplace regulations. I said, ‘but it’s a wooden caterpillar’, and he said ‘yes, but it’s smoking’, and I said ‘no, it’s not’. I really thought someone was winding me up, I wasn’t taking it seriously. It’s not even a real shisha pipe, it’s an ornament, it doesn’t work. But he didn’t have a problem with the shisha pipe, it was the caterpillar smoking on business premises.

“I said to him, even if it was a real caterpillar the chances of it lighting the pipe were pretty thin, but the fact that it’s a wooden caterpillar renders it impossible.” Debbie said she refused to let the officer investigate further, and told him to leave the shop. She said: “I wouldn’t let him investigate, I said to him ‘if you haven’t got better things to do, I certainly have, you need to leave, I don’t believe it needs further investigating’. He said there was a real problem in Blackburn with shisha. I don’t know if that’s with caterpillars smoking it.



“I did think about getting the caterpillar an electronic cigarette, or putting him on patches or something!” The window display features several characters from the Lewis Carroll novels, including the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar which Alice doesn’t like because it is rather rude and asks difficult questions. Initially a council spokeswoman said that the officer had entered the shop to check that shisha pipes were not being sold illegally. But after it was pointed out that shisha pipes can be sold without a licence, the council instead said that the officer had wanted to check that the florist was not also operating as an illegal shisha den.