…Fox-lox took them into his den and he and his young ones soon gobbled up poor Chicken-licken, Hen-len, Cock-lock, Duck-luck, Drake-lake, Goose-loose, Gander-lander, and Turkey-lurkey; and they never saw the King to tell him that the sky had fallen.
It started with an announcement that a United Airways flight has been forced to land at Boston, that US air force fighter jets had been scrambled and that sniffer dogs were going through the luggage. We were told that a woman has been found aboard with a box of matches, a screwdriver and – quelle horreur – a jar of Vaseline. Much earnest discussion followed in the sombre yet strangely hysterical tones that are so characteristic of the BBC’s News 24 Service. One expert opined that the devilishly cunning woman might have evaded security because her screwdriver had been made of, say, plastic or even wood. The tension becoming all too much for me and fearing that any moment John Reid might be wheeled on to make a ‘presidential’ announcement, I switched the television off.
Later, it transpired that the woman was in her 60s and had been carrying nothing illicit except a pot of hand cream. Suffering an attack of claustrophobia, she had ‘caused a disturbance’ (that, one feels, is putting it mildly). The newscaster noted with – I feel – a degree of malicious satisfaction that she had been restrained prior to the forced landing and that she was now being interrogated by US police.
If Al Qaeda has reduced us to such a quivering state of pusillanimity that a panicky elderly lady with a jar of Oil of Olay can ground passenger planes, scramble the US Air Force and hit world headlines, what hope is there left for us? One prays to God that whatever ‘items of interest’ the police are turning up in their search of the woods near High Wycombe for terrorist evidence, these don’t include moisturisers and other skin care products.
Postscript (Sunday, August 20, 2006)
Chicken-licken continues to rule the roost. A plane has been grounded because a sick bag was found on which some fool had scribbled that there was a bomb aboard. Meanwhile, a passenger mutiny has resulted in two innocent albeit dark skinned foreigners being evicted from their tourist flight from Malaga to Manchester.
