DON'T you just sometimes wish you could just walk down the road with your dog without having to carry one of those disgusting little plastic bags and a pooper scooper, and allow your pooch to decide where and when he is going to make his mark? Or sit in a restaurant and blow smoke over the next table as they consume the last of the sticky toffee pudding without causing the outbreak of World War Three. Or even light a huge and smelly bonfire in your back garden at nine in the morning secure in the knowledge that you won't get a letter from the council and a visit from three environmental health officers in the next few days. Only kidding. Of course it's anti social and non politically correct but didn't life used to be so simple and now it's so complicated that sometimes you just want to scream? Or am I imagining that personal freedom used to be a lot more personal and a lot more free than it is now. I thought of this when I was watching the Airline programme on the television the other night. It's a programme I enjoy because it endlessly shows people who are far dafter than I am in that they manage to forget the only thing that guarantees that they won't be sitting comfortably on the Costa Del whatsit in a few hours, ie their passports. It was the Christmas edition, probably last year's, and it showed EasyJet staff confiscating Christmas crackers from people who were fleeing abroad for the festive period, no doubt to find somewhere you can sit in a restaurant and blow smoke over the next table. The reason for this confiscation was because of new security rules and someone in the EasyJet decision making machine had pointed out that crackers have, well, crackers in them which must contain some sort of explosive in order to crack and were therefore not wanted on voyage. I watched in amazement as the staff enjoyed themselves pulling the crackers while the bewildered owners looked on smiling in that embarrassed sort of way people do when they know that somewhere along the line they have got the short straw and also they were on television so it wasn't wise to go into airline/cracker rage. It seemed to be perfectly alright to pull exploding crackers at the airport check-in desk but taking them on board wasn't. The staff were quite jolly about it, but then they would be, they were getting the pleasure of twenty quids worth of crackers, the previous owners weren't. Now the thing about crackers, as everyone, including EasyJet executives, should know by now is that no matter how much you pay for them a large per centage don't actually crack at all. All that happens, when a person pulling them with you is determined to win at any cost and grabs their end with all the determination of an Olympic tug-o-war champion, is that the cracker splits at one end, a plastic fish falls out onto your dinner and a motto which is usually of the ilk of 'why did the submarine blush? Because it saw Queen Mary's bottom', flutters across the table. Oh, and if you're really lucky, a flimsy paper crown in virulent violet tumbles into your glass of wine. The cracking bit remains defiantly uncracked. Crackers are not the best and most reliable weapons of choice for a would-be terrorist, not unless he's into wearing paper crowns and collecting plastic fish. Having seen this, and because I'm flying with EasyJet soon, I checked into their website and found a whole list of what we can't take on airlines. Most were sensible precautions, like nail scissors and the like. Flammable liquids are not allowed, which is understandable, but wait a minute, I now note I can't take my Braun hair curler, or at least not the gas canister that runs it. Bad news for those of us who want nice bouncy hair on our holidays. I have taken mine before, and checked with staff to see if I could carry it in hand- luggage, but that was before the terrorist threat. Although I know that it is unlikely anyone will run amok with a curler threatening passengers with overheated curls it isn't allowed anymore and I shall have to accept it. Neither can I take more than one lighter, which can't be a disposable one, or one box of safety matches, not AND but OR, so that I shall be relying on only one way to light a cigarette when I get there, and you can bet your boots that the lighter will decide at that moment that its flint needs replacing and I'll be left forlornly turning its little wheel trying to get a spark. I could decide on the matches, but they might get damp and I have a strong feeling a box of household matches wouldn't be accepted either. I do know these are necessary precautions, and I do abide by them, removing scissors, tweezers, corkscrews, cocktail sticks, sharp combs etc before I go, and I don't even consider taking my favourite handbag which has a metal bar for a handle because it could perhaps be used to batter the passenger in front of me, tempting at times especially when they keep letting down the back of their seat just when I'm eating my meal which has been microwaved to a temperature approaching molten lava which successfully removes taste buds so you can't identify what you are eating. It's really just one more lot of complications that life offers these days. And here's another one. PIN numbers. (Actually, to be pedantic, it isn't right to say PIN numbers because PIN stands for personal identification number so you are really saying number numbers, but hey, who cares?) I was behind an elderly lady in the supermarket the other day who couldn't remember her PIN and the cashier said sternly that soon, but she didn't say how soon, everyone would have to remember their number because they wouldn't be swiping cards any more. 'I suppose I'll have to write it down,' said the lady. Yes, she will, and put it in her purse right next to her card which is exactly what banks tell you not to do. And what about those of us who have American Express cards? We don't have PINs because AMEX doesn't use them. We'll probably have to pay cash. But not if we want to book a last minute flight, because another point revealed on Airline is that they don't take cash or cheques for flights at the airport, only credit cards. Cheques I can understand, but cash? Then there's passwords, which everyone has to have these days to access everything on the Internet, from innocuous gardening sites to secure sites to make payments. Do you do what you are warned never to do, have the same password for everything, thus making it easy for a hacker to break into your account? Or do you have separate ones, so that you can never remember whether Doggydo34 is your bank account or whether it's Dahlia45? And if you do have different ones, do you write them down somewhere, possibly in code and then forget which code you chose? All too confusing, especially for the elderly who remember the golden days before PIN numbers and political correctness. The days when you could clip a young mini vandal round the ear when you found him beheading your beloved tulips with a stick without bringing down the full force of the law. The days when elderly gentlemen with a twinkle in their eye but no energy to do anything about it could pat a young lady on the knee and call her girlie without an outbreak of feminine outrage. Or, come to think of it, the days when you could organise a simple nativity play at a primary school without risk of being accused of causing inter-racial disharmony. And worse is to come. Under the new animal acts you could, theoretically, be prosecuted for buying a child a goldfish or winning the same child a goldfish at a fair. This, however, may not be a bad thing, because how many of us have at one time found our heart sinking as an excited child arrives back from a visit to the fair at 9pm at night bearing a slightly leaking plastic bag containing a sad looking fish and heralding a frantic search for something suitable to put the said fish, now named Goldie and already beloved, in before its water disappears altogether. A prior warning of 'and don't even think of trying to win a fish because Daddy might go to jail' could work wonders. Or probably not.
