Friday 27 July 2012

Taking Flight

The story of the 11-year-old boy who took off and flew to Rome, without ticket, boarding pass or passport, reminded me of the time my own son, at a similar age - hats off to him - took a day trip to France with a friend, similarly sans tickets, boarding passes or passports. They took the train to Dover (ticketless), boarded the ferry without difficulty, enjoyed the crossing, disembarked at Calais for a restorative dish of moules frites (and no doubt a few beers), boarded a return ferry and arrived back in Blighty without any impediment - and without their parents having a clue what had been going on; they had a perfectly conceived cover story, and we only found out some while after the event that any of this had occurred.
There are two lessons to be learned here: one, don't ever kid yourself you know what your children are up to - you don't, though they might possibly tell you about some of it long after the event. And two, no system can be said to be secure until it's been tested against the ingenuity, determination and sheer nerve of an 11-year-old boy.

4 comments:

  1. Ah, we have all this to come... Shudder!

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  2. Forewarned is foerarmed Kate - tho there's nothing you can do really, just hope they don't get up to anything worse than you did...

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  3. At least your son and the boy from Manchester actually made it to their foreign destinations, unlike Tony Blair who only boasted he did. On the Des' O' Connor show in 1996 he claimed that as a schoolboy he went to Newcastle Airport and tried to stow away on a flight to the Bahamas. "I snuck on to the plane, and we were literally about to take off when the stewardess came up to me and said, 'I don't think I actually saw your boarding pass'. Blair was quickly rumbled when it was pointed out that at the time in question there were no flights from Newcastle to the Bahamas. The habit of lying seems to have set in early

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  4. Yes indeed - well remembered Ingoldsby. And I'm sure he believed it was true anyway, simply because he said it - hey, how could it be otherwise? Broon inherited this strange mindset, in spades...

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