PRIOR to going on holiday I read a piece by Germaine Greer in the Sunday papers bemoaning the fact that airport security was in the habit of removing tiny nail scissors and nail files from passengers but that on board wine was still served in glass bottles. Ms Greer was still smarting from being refused passage on an airline because she didn't have her passport with her. Quite right, you might have said, except when you read on you found out that she wasn't trying to leave the country, she was only flying to Glasgow. Apparently you need your passport when flying internally on this particular airliner, no other identification will do. I'm perfectly happy with security restrictions, they're for all our protection, and didn't get particularly annoyed when a rather overzealous girl wouldn't let me take all my lighters with me on the grounds that they were 'excess inflammables'. I suspect she had just taken a course, because she spoke in that kind of course-speak which doesn't include making eye contact with anyone. I didn't bother to point out that aircraft are basically flying inflammables with hundreds of tons of fuel on board, I knew it wouldn't make a difference. My son, who was flying with me, had a novelty bottle opener removed from his key ring. Now I don't know how many people have run amok with bottle openers, but it can't be many. He was told he could have it back when he returned if he paid £10 'for charity'. I think it's a bit of a cheek actually, especially when the list of forbidden items in hand luggage doesn't appear to mention dangerous bottle openers (not a corkscrew by the way). And oh yes, the wine was in glass bottles. So, come to think of it, is the duty free alcohol AND you can buy lighters on the plane. Life is still rather puzzling to those of us who are getting on a bit. After a week of no news whatsoever, at least not in English, I returned to find the new 'right to roam' laws seem to have come into force and that there have been massive demonstrations about hunting. Or the coming lack of it to be accurate. I'm certainly not going to get this column involved in the latter's politics, I don't particularly want a bunch of hounds tearing round my perennials, but the right to roam thing is interesting because I always thought we had it anyway. I remember an American friend saying how lucky we were in Britain because we could go off the beaten track in the countryside, whereas in the US you were likely to be confronted by someone carrying a shotgun if you so much as trod on their land. Actually I think she said I was 'cute', but then she is American, and was even more enthralled to hear about our tradition of rights of way which permit us to continue to use ancient pathways which are protected by law and not governed by landowners' whims. I'm sure a lot of people, including me, are not entirely clear about the right to roam details and what extra rights they give us. Some, I'm sure, will worry that they may wake up one morning and find a bunch of people in kagools and woolly hats tramping round their garden admiring the view from their patio. This patently isn't true, and so you don't have to change the notice on your gates from no hawkers to no hikers. As a child, we didn't have right to roam legislation, we just did it anyway, especially if in the company of my grandmother. As I have mentioned before, a notice saying 'no trespassing' was like a red rag to a bull in her eyes. In fact it often involved a bull in a field, which we met head on after she had ignored the notice and thrust aside the gate, usually telling me 'don't be silly, it's only an old moo cow!' My somewhat inadequate sex education took a long time to work out how to spot the difference. My grandmother was an expert in rights of way, carrying a mental map of the village and its surrounds and was as avid as any modern rambler in exerting her rights. She had a one-woman campaign to make sure that these ways were 'walked' regularly, and would shoulder her way through fields of corn or stumble over newly ploughed land, refusing my pleas to walk round the edge of the field. 'This is the way people always went', she would say firmly, pushing me over yet another stile. We would occasionally meet the landowner and a slight fracas would take place, of the 'it's a right of way, no it isn't' variety. I suspect that sometimes my grandmother made up some of the right of way claims, because she did occasionally back down and apologised very nicely, which usually led the landowner to tell her that it was quite all right for us to walk around his fields. When there weren't rights of way we walked anyway, taking favourite paths at different times of the year. Most people seemed not to mind, providing you closed gates and did no damage. One or two farmers were what my grandmother termed 'nasty pieces of work', in other words they objected to trespassers in general and many, to my grandmother in particular. One farm was run by twins, the one pleasant and chatty, the other taciturn and unpleasant. The problem was that they were identical so you could be in mid-greeting to the one you thought was the nice one and then discover that it was the other one who would become very surly and tell us yet again that we weren't supposed to be crossing his bottom field. Generally, though, we could roam at will and nobody objected if we picked the blackberries or gathered the wild mushrooms, or clambered up crab apple trees to take home the little golden fruits to make jelly. We also walked along the railway embankments, where treasure troves of flowers awaited to be picked, many throw out plants from the few houses which lined the little steam train line. The only people who were not entirely impressed by this early right to roamer were those who owned large estates with parkland, who weren't too keen to see a smallish woman in a neat crepe coat and stout shoes, accompanied by a child who was probably dragging a cloth bag full of crab apples, tripping over their lawns or through their shrubbery. If challenged my grandmother would ask them politely if they minded us talking a 'short cut' to get home in time for tea and politeness made them nod agreement somewhat reluctantly. What they didn't realise was that my grandmother would take this permission as being a lifetime passport to using their carefully manicured grounds as a short and a long cut. Although a lifetime Liberal she would quote Karl Marx's 'all property is theft' as we passed the huge house on our way across the croquet lawn. As for right to roam legislation, she would, in one way, have approved that at last her idea of a god given right to walk the land had been given some sort of official approval. On the other hand she would have said that a law wasn't needed because she was going to do it anyway.
- Mary Richards