Brown leaves and brown legs - au revoir August

Today, as the more alert amongst you in possession of calendars will know, is the last day of August. For those of us resident in Paris, this is the week when life returns to normal. Like that final scene in Jacques Tati's magnificent comedy Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, France's beaches have been abandoned, families have returned en masse from their four weeks (or more...) away, and office cleaners are already having to vacuum up small blizzards of peeled skin.

The city itself is in a similar state: piles of brown leaves are already growing high in gutters, discarded by trees either parched by last week's gonzo temperatures (38 degrees in the afternoon, no lower than 30 degrees at night...) or simply confused - as we all are - by what time of year it is thanks to climate change. Either way, there is an incongruously autumnal vibe to the place

People are notably a similar colour, and hemlines and shirt sleeves are that much shorter to show off that hard-earned tan. These are as much attempts to display some form of receipt for holidays received, of course, but beneath the first-week-back demeanour there is also a palpable sense of disappointment. Breakfasting on coffee and a croissant this morning in my local cafe - with people-watching still the pre-eminent spectator sport in Paris - I could readily see the reluctant gait of the relaxed and bronzed heading for the Métro with a palpable gloom hanging over them at the prospect of an inbox full of reply-all horrors.

I've blogged before about the joys of working through August in Paris, of having the office, cafes and even the dry cleaners almost to yourself. It is truly liberating when everyone disappears. Paris may be nicest in the springtime, as Francis Albert once sung, but it's even nicer when everyone's out. Your mornings don't begin abruptly with impatient drivers honking their horns in a pointless attempt to shift a parked delivery truck. There's a knowing civility about the place, as those left behind get on with their lives in the knowledge that they have a seat on the Métro while those who'd normally occupy it are sitting cheek-by-jowl on the Côte D'Azur, dodging the burkini police.

This has been my last August in Paris. By this time next year I'll be back in London, where the holiday season is marked only by a slight lightening of the Underground crush as families with their 2.4 children take off for the pre-requsite British fortnight. I, too, will be considering what I do for my summer holiday: perhaps, perversely, I should spend two weeks in Paris? At least it'll be quiet.

Heavy medal

We're a funny bipolar nation, we Brits, when it comes to sport. Choosy, too. If the English football team suffers an early tournament exit (most times, it would appear) the UK's southern two-thirds self-immolates in a wretch of doom and gloom. But when Wales goes further in the Euros than their easterly neighbour has in twenty years, all of a sudden everyone is Welsh. In a similar vein, if Andy Murray loses - he's a "moody Scots git" to everyone below Hadrian's Wall; but if Murray wins he's suddenly the greatest subject these islands has produced since Churchill.

Not far from these observations is the British brand of pessimism, which burns more brightly when it comes to sport. In one form it manifests itself in stark contrast to our American cousins, who revel in success and the path to it, whereas we Brits regard success with suspicion and, once achieved, even contempt. As is often remarked about the British press - they'll build you up and then knock you down. Whereas in America they just keep building.

So how should we be feeling this particular Monday? "Bloody brilliant", should be the collective reply. I won't invite an actual response, but with the Rio Olympics ending last night, and Team Great Britain closing its account with second place in the medal table, behind the United States, obviously, but in front of China, we have much to be genuinely thrilled about - even if, naturally, we weren't expecting to be.

Before the games began British media attention was mostly focused on what was expected to go wrong in Rio, or already had: Zika, terrorism, crime, unfinished stadiums, drugs, infrastructure and poverty. Thankfully Team GB's incredible haul of 27 gold, 23 silver and 17 bronze medals has at least cleared the decks for something infinitely more uplifting - pictures of Mo Farah, surely one of athletics' greatest personalities; the women's hockey team after their golden goal penalty success (see, it can happen...!); Sir Bradley Wiggins - now a member of that exclusive club to have earned five Olympic gold medals; Laura Trott and her fellow women cyclists, oh, and her husband-to-be Jason Kenny; Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark on the water and Nicola Adams in the ring; Nick Skelton at the age of 58 and having been almost invalided out of showjumping; and Justin Rose and Andy Murray - multi-millionaire professional sportsmen, perhaps, - but in their respective gold medal-winning efforts, invoked the suspense and excitement that Olympic sport is supposed to be about.

Twitter/Team GB

In winning 67 medals, Team GB appeared on the podium more times than ever previously on foreign soil. Not only that, but Britain became the first nation to win more medals in an Olympics immediately after hosting one. So, now the analysis begins as to why: inevitably, we must endure some homespun awkwardness about what it has taken to get to such a lofty position, with gold medals in 15 sports - more than any other country - and, alphabetically, from athletics to tennis. Because let's not beat about the bush, money - yes, vulgar money - has played a clear part. And that's something we don't like talking about in Britain.

In becoming, a "sporting superpower", as Liz Nicholl, the head of the UK body responsible for funneling state money to the Olympic sports yesterday branded us, Great Britain has transformed itself into something globally unrecognisable. It has enjoyed plenty of medal success before at the Olympics and delivered plenty of enduring champions, but considering that in 1996 in Atlanta Britain produced just one gold medal and ended up 36th in the medal table, to come second this time around with more medals than even official targets had set, is nothing short of remarkable.

John Major's Tory government may have been swept out of power in 1997 as a result of a series of sleeze cases (which ironically included elite bedroom gymnastics), but it was Major who launched the National Lottery, creating the funding basis for British Olympic sport. The Blair government continued the effort, and by the Sydney games, state funding had risen from just £5 million pre-Atlanta to £54 million for the 2000 event - where Britain won 28 medals and came 10th in the table. For London 2012, with the nation looking on with both pride and trepidation (yes, the pessimism streek once more), Team GB was being funded to the tune of £264 million. The level since has risen even higher, to almost £350 million for both the Olympic and Paralympic sports.

So what has made the difference? Runners, swimmers, cyclists and their teammates in other disciplines are still getting up at 4am to train every day; "sacrifice" is still the predominant word used to describe what goes on over the course of four years between games. But it's what goes on around these athletes that makes the difference: the training facilities at home and abroad, the armies of sports scientists, even the luxury of a bespoke location for the team camp in Rio itself played a part in Britain's overall success.

Twitter/Team GB

Is this buying a title, to use football parlance? Well, in a way, obviously it is. But whereas in football we get tied up in envy and avarice at the rows of gleaming foreign supercars at club training grounds owned by young men barely out of boyhood, and put it down to market forces, we view any signs of wealth attached to Olympian endeavour as something less worthy. We're never satisfied, but perhaps now we will be. The money, invested well in Britain's Olympic effort, will produce a legacy of sorts.

There are still questions from some quarters about the legacy of 2012 in terms of the facilities built, but if the unprecedented success of these most recent games and their predecessor inspires the next generation to follow in the cycle tracks, pool wake and running spike marks of the current generation, sport and the nation will be so much better off.

We used to sit fuming at the telly when we saw Communist nations winning things with suspicious muscularity, so for a country of 65-odd million people to come second behind the US of A, and ahead of the most populated country on the planet, we should be hanging up bunting and inviting our neighbours to street parties over what has been achieved by everyone - Lottery players included - who have contributed to Team GB's success this time around.

Sometimes I do wonder whether we Brits really know how to enjoy ourselves. The run-up to London 2012 began with concerns about the public transport system working and anti-aircraft missiles being installed on tower blocks in Hackney. But for that August, we went about with siles on our faces, and ended both the London Olympics and Paralympics with big, broad smiles on our faces, everyone, more or less, in agreement that they'd just witnessed the greatest event of their lives. Today, we should be doing the same. Even if thing weren't perfect in Rio (you know, green water, woefully half-empty venues, robberies and idiot swimmers claiming robberies), the last 17 days have still upheld the magic that all Olympics always turn out to be . Especially, but perhaps unusually, for us Brits.

And we're back

Yes, yes, I know we're in the midst of the Olympics (and when I say "midst", I'm writing this at 2am while watching Mo Farah become the most incredible human being in the history of everything), and it's only the second weekend of August, but the football season began over a week ago and the Premier League is only now catching up. Which means that I'm beyond Ten-Year-Old-On-Christmas-Eve Mode. Christmas Day is here.

This time last year I did the thing all football fans do with their respective teams and dismissed Chelsea's opening day draw with Swansea as just that, an opening day draw with Swansea. This is entirely in keeping with the Trevor Brooking-strength non-commitalism we adopt in the opening salvos of the season: "Win? It's only the first game, don't get carried away"; "Draw? It's only the first game, nothing to be alarmed about"; "Lose? It's only the first game, today's result doesn't count". For us, trudging out of Stamford Bridge on August 8 last year, what was there to be concerned at? The manager, José Mourinho, had signed a megabucks new four-year deal just the day before, and despite that brouhaha over the "medical department" attending an injured player at an awkward moment in the game's trajectory, we were the defending champions and - who cares? - it was very sunny indeed. Let's dwell less on what followed.

So, with the sun shining once again and everyone - including José, apparently - still in their start-of-season happy place, what do the next 39 weeks hold? Absolutely anything, to be honest. Football is chaos, remember? All last week the papers were trailing the new Premier League season (the only league that counts, we assume...) with their football writers' predictions. Now, you'd have thought they'd have learned their lesson last time around, when everyone seemed hell-bent on reinstating Chelsea at the top, and the best the bookies could give you on Leicester winning it was 5,000/1, which is as big a slap in the teeth as you could possibly get. But, no. Predictably, this time around, Manchesters United and City, in either order, are overwhelmingly the pundits' picks, though notably there is no real consensus as to which way round.

Realistically, however, it is pretty much going to be about United and City and their respective Iberian managers. The media-amplified rivalry between Mourinho and Pep Guardiola is being cranked up to well beyond 11, and rightly so. It's good box office. The Portuguese has taken his customary braggadocio to Old Trafford and inflated it further by, first, signing that ageing show pony Ibrahimovic, and then securing the inspirationally bonkers purchase of Paul Pogba. Of course, £89 million (plus his wages and other add-ons) is a ridiculous amount of money for a football player - none is really worth even half of that - but United will earn hansomely from Pogba shirts, DVDs and all the other tat they'll sell in the Far East over the next five years. You've got to admire them for having the lunacy to spend such as sum.

Down the road, Guardiola is getting on with his thing, making seemingly unthinkable decisions like dropping Joe Hart and generally being The Cerebral One. Yesterday's narrow 2-1 win over Sunderland will give him something to think about, but then I refer to my comments above (only the first game, etc). It is, though, a thrilling prospect, having Mourinho and Guardiola sparring with each other this season - one, with his stubborn dogma when it comes to formations, the latter with his deeply analytical approach (and, it has to be said, greater articulation - Mourinho is still using "moment" as a catch-all word, 12 years after he first arrived in England). People keep saying their rivalry is just a load of hype, but lets just see what happens as the competition between their teams cranks up.

But let's not be fooled for one minute into thinking that this season's Premier League will be just about two managers. It's going to be about all 20. There will be the pressure on Sean Dyche (Burnley), the refreshingly individual Aitor Karanka (Middlesbrough) and Who Knows? (Hull City) to not be immediately installed as automatic relegationees having only just come up; Howe (Bournemouth); Pardew (Crystal Palace), Pulis (West Brom) and Moyes (Sunderland) will have to avoid getting sucked into a relegation scrap themselves; Bilic (West Ham) will have to deliver a standard of football big enough to warrant occupation of an Olympic stadium; Koeman (Everton) will follow in Martinez's footsteps in demonstrating that Everton can still compete on the big stage; Puel (Southampton) and Guidolin (Swansea City) will have to continuously demonstrate who they actually are, while Walter Mazzarri (Watford) will have to smile and bear with his club's eccentric ownership.

Arsène Wenger enters his final season under contract as Arsenal manager, supporter dissent growing as his chequebook continues to avoid daylight and mirrors like a Transylvanian count. At Liverpool, Jürgen Klopp, his patter of one-liners and his amusing jaw arrangement, enters his first full season as Anfield boss with the weight of expectation no less heavy on his shoulders as it was when he pitched up last October. Perhaps more so. Liverpool fans are notoriously impatient, and for all his bonhomie and wackiness, Klopp can't afford to be the league's class clown. Mauricio Pochettino'sTottenham will remain viewed as the team who lost the title last season, collapsing at Stamford Bridge (in what was probably the home side's one and only performance of merit) and in the process, losing out to Arsenal for second spot almost at last knockings.

And what of the team they conceded the title to? Claudio Ranieri has seen everything in his much travelled managerial career. His response to winning the league in May was as gentlemanly and dignified as it was pleasing to see. Will he win it again? Unlikely, given the power struggle coming out of Manchester, but he and Leicester have proven that they've got the impossible in them, so don't rule them out of contention for a top five spot just yet. And, no, yesterday's surprise opening day defeat to Hull City doesn't mean anything.

All of which leaves me with Antonio Conte and Chelsea. Frankly, they should have won the league again last season. There really is no reason why, with the squad that won it in 2014-15 intact that 2015-16 shouldn't have been a repeat performance. But this season? Taking into account that the title is one for the Manchesters to lose, Chelsea and Conte's agenda will be to restore belief that Chelsea are a force in English football. Only then, and the restoration of Champions League football, will they really be able to compete in the transfer market for audacious prizes like a Pogba. Conte's primary objective is to build Chelsea back up mentally, not just physically. And that means getting on with business, even if it turns out that the supposed talent acquisition dream team of technical director Michael Emenalo and chief negotiator Marina Granovskaia fail, once again, to deliver the coach's wish list. Mourinho had one last summer, Conte this summer. So far no one on it has turned up at Stamford Bridge to sign a contract. Let's just hope the club medics don't upset Conte on Monday night, as I would hate for history to repeat itself again...

Still missing the go-to laughter machine

There is a bitter irony about laughter being, apparently, "the best medicine". For all its medicinal benefits - boosting the immune system, reducing stress, enhancing resilience, preventing heart disease and so on - it's impossible to ignore how one of the funniest people ever to grace this planet was unable himself to defeat the ravages of human frailty.

That person was Robin Williams, whose death two years ago today is still hard to come to terms with. You would have thought that in this of all years we'd be better equipped: plenty deride online grief - the overwrought posts on Twitter and Facebook for icons never known personally but mourned for as if family members - but in a way, Williams was just that. He was so much a part of our family life.

From his TV debut in Happy Days as the alien Mork (a shark-jumping moment in itself for 1950s Milwaulkee-set sitcom) to its spinoff Mork & Mindy, through his first forays into film (the tragically underated The World According To Garp and Moscow On The Hudson), international audiences were blown away by this human hurricane. God knows what it must have been like to have been starting out in the improv comedy clubs in the late 1970s when this Juilliard-trained, only child of a no-nonsense Ford executive father and a witty, Mississippi-born "Southern belle" mother, unleashed his gift for free-form comedy, one that had been partly shaped making up voices for the enormous collection of toy soldiers he played with as a kid on his own.

Actually, someone who knows what it was like was David Letterman, whom, before his days as America's king of late night chat, saw Williams for the first time as a fellow performer at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles. In his moving tribute to Williams on the first edition of The Late Show after the comedian's death, Letterman recalled: "It's like nothing we had ever seen before, nothing we had ever imagined before. And then he finishes and I thought, 'Oh that's it, they're gonna have to put an end to showbusiness because what could happen after this?' Honest to God, you thought, 'Holy crap, there goes my chance in showbusiness because of this guy''.

Of all the tributes to Williams I've seen and read, Letterman's - unsurprisingly - resonated the warmest, with their 38-year friendship and kindred comic spirit showing through, especially in a compilation tape of the comedian's 50 appearances on Letterman's shows over the years. Summing up those shows Letterman recalled: "One, I didn't have to do anything - all I had to do was sit here and watch the machine, and Two, people would watch. If they knew Robin was on this show the viewership would go up because they wanted to see Robin. And believe me that wasn't true of just television - I believe that was true of the kind of guy he was. People were drawn to him because of this electricity, whatever it was that he radiated that propelled him and powered him."

Like a favourite album you keep returning to, Williams was my go-to guy for laughter. That sounds like trite showbiz billboarding, but it really was that simple.  I can - and have - lost entire Sunday afternoons YouTubing Williams' chat show appearances, watching that fervent mind riff volumniously off the tiniest feed. As Letterman said of his own compilation of Williams' Late Show appearances: "It will make you laugh, and really that's what we should take from this - he could make you laugh under any circumstance".

Emotions still expressed two years ago after it was revealed that Williams had committed suicide reflect just how much people held - and still hold - him in their hearts. There were many who expressed anger, branding his suicide as selfish. It was as if the man who'd given us so much - from Mork & Mindy to Aladdin, Good Morning Vietnam to Mrs. Doubtfire, the schmaltzy Patch Adams and Hook, the disturbing One Hour Photo and Insomnia, and the powerful Good Will Hunting, Dead Poets Society and Awakenings - still owed us.

As we now know, there was no more to give. Williams took his own life not as the ultimate act of the sad clown of clické, but as a tragic combination of many debilitating factors. Depression - widely suspected of being the trigger in the wake of financial concerns and his most recent TV show being cancelled - was not the sole cause. "It was not depression that killed Robin," his widow Susan said in one of her first interviews after his death. "Depression was one of let’s call it 50 symptoms, and it was a small one."

Although Williams had a history of health issues, including the cocaine addiction he sobered up from (and forms an essential ingredient of his seminal One Night At The Met show) and surgery in 2009 to correct an irregular heartbeat, he'd been diagnosed with a neurological condition called 'diffuse Lewy body dementia' or DLB, which causes fluctuations in mental status, hallucinations and impairment of motor function. Susan Williams said that the symptoms were worsening ("he was just disintegrating"). The comedian had also been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and this progressive decline had begun to prey heavily on his belief in being able to perform. In his last month, friends had noticed he was become sadder. Susan Williams revealed on American TV, he was well aware he was losing his mind, and then hit a breaking point in July 2014. "It was like the dam broke," she revealed, adding, "If Robin was lucky, he would’ve had maybe three years left. And they would’ve been hard years."

Suicide, she said, had not been foreseen, however. Letterman, in his tribute, said that "more questions are raised than can possibly be answered", by his friend's self-inflicted death "Beyond being a very talented man, and a good friend and a gentleman, I'm sorry, like everybody else, I had no idea that the man was in pain, that the man was suffering".

"Talent" is one of those words that gets showered on performers when they die, but for Williams, it's a word that often got overlooked. As the Oscars and Baftas seem to reflect, comedy is not always an easy attribute to reward. If someone's funny, and they make us laugh, we settle for that without demanding anything else. It's a simple emotional response that doesn't need over-examination. But if you watch Williams on a chat show or clearly deviating off-script with his wildly inventive improv in Good Morning Vietnam, it was profoundly obvious just what a unique talent he was. Where it came from - if it had a distinct origin or evolved - is hard to say.

"There's a kind of loneliness to all comedians, but there was a certain sort of solitude in him that I didn't see in a lot of people," was an interesting remark given to Rolling Stone magazine's Willams tribute issue by his friend David Steinberg. Perhaps some of this had to do with being an only child. His Paradise Cay home, where he died, is in the same secluded peninsular across the bay from San Francisco that his family had moved to when Williams was a teenager. Even after Juilliard he returned straight back to California.

Many have cited his unnanounced appearances at improv clubs as a basic craving of attention. Those close to him, however, say it wasn't attention he craved but feedback. And despite TV appearances to the contrary, he wasn't always 'on': "People think they know you," he said in an interview once. "They expect you to be literally like you are on TV or in the movies, bouncing off the walls. A woman in an airport once said to me, 'Be zany!'. People always want zany, goofy shit from me. It takes a lot of energy to do that. If you do that all the time, you'll burn out".

His release was cycling. Having sobered up from cocaine addiction ("God's way of telling you that you've got too much money) and alcoholism ("It escalated so quickly - within a week I was buying so many bottles I sounded like a wind chime walking down the street") Williams channeled his addictive personality into buying bicycles (at his death he owned 50) and riding them around the glorious Marin County headlands near his home, or in Tuscany with friends. Cycling was, he once explained, "an escape - a safe place to get away from it all".

"My battles with addiction definitely shaped how I am now," Williams said another time. "They really made me deeply appreciate human contact. And the value of friends and family, how precious that is". He was married three times - the first to waitress Valerie Velardi whom he'd met pre-fame in San Francisco, the second to his family nanny, Marsha Garces, in 1989, and the third to graphic designer Susan Schneider in 2009 after they'd met in an Apple Store. His three children - son Zak, from his first marriage (and another key reference point in the Live At The Met show), and daughter Zelda and youngest son Cody from his second - kept him grounded. Family life appeared to replicate the family ideal Williams projected in some of his cuddlier films, and played a profound part in protecting Williams from those traits which threatened to unravel him.

In one of the most moving tributes, Williams' friend, the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, who wrote and directed the actor in the ironic anti-family comedy World's Greatest Dad, quoted one of his character's lines in an interview with Katie Couric on Yahoo! TV: "'I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.' [Robin] wasn't, he was surrounded by a wonderful family.”

In the end, though, not even the strength of family life could indemnify Robin Williams from his physical debilitation. His suicide may, still, not be agreeable or acceptable to some. But perhaps we have, two years on, a better understanding of the creeping, cumulative despair that led him to it. Perhaps, too, we're being the selfish ones, wishing that, to quote Terry Gilliam - "the most unique mind on the planet", the comic genius behind Mork, Adrian Cronauer, Euphegenia Doubtfire, Aladdin and thousands of chat show and comedy club riffs could keep turning. Sadly, it could not.

Throwing away the message in a bottle

A month from tomorrow will be the 15th anniversary of 9/11, the event that, without resorting to hype, changed the world politically, diplomatically, militarily, economically and, in so many ways, in terms of our liberty.

Along with triggering what seems like ceaseless conflict in the Middle East for the last decade and half, that deadly Tuesday morning in September 2011 changed air travel forever. In America, where I was living at the time and where I saw this change happen almost overnight, air travel became more of an ordeal. Because it had to. Removing belts, shoes, sharp items and laptops became the necessary inconvenience.

Exactly yen years ago today, airports introduced urgent new restrictions on how much liquid you could take airside following the discovery of a plot to blow up US-bound airliners. Terrorists planned to use chemical explosives that could be concocted in-flight by combining liquids freely available in high street shops. As a result, all liquids, creams, gels, pastes and aerosols taken through security control as part of hand luggage have to be carried in containers holding 100ml or less, must be carried separately in a single, transparent and resealable bag no larger than 20x20cm. Anything over 100ml must be packed in hold luggage...or be thrown away.

So surely, over ten years of these restrictions, we have grown used to them? With British airports alone handling 250 million passengers a year, and budget airlines travelling to more destinations with people flying more frequently as a result, it shouldn't be a surprise to discover restrictions on what you can take through airport security.

And yet, in the 15 years since 9/11, and ten years since the Manchester bomb plot, it still staggers me that people in security queues haven't got the message. Even allowing for the fact I fly a lot and many people don't, it is still alarming to see people taking umbrage at removing belts and shoes, or only thinking about taking off overcoats when asked. Like most frequent travellers, we've grown stoic about airport security, as should everyone else - it is there, after all, for our own protection.

However, ten years since the restrictions on liquids was brought in, people are till trying to get through airport security with illicit quantities of toothpaste, deodrants, shampoo, shower gel and, yes, bottled water. According to research published today by the Manchester Aiports Group - which operates Manchester, Stansted, East Midlands and Bournemouth airports, representing about a fifth of all passengers passing through UK airports - one-in-five security trays still contain more liquid than the regulations allow.

Manchester Airport alone fills up more than 80 wheelie bins every day containing confiscated plastic bottles, and the MAG group overall says it has taken more than 140 million tonnes of bottled drinks off passengers over the last 12 months as they went through scanners. Furthermore, they said that that confusion over liquids remained the single biggest cause of security delays during peak times.

In fairness, it can be confusing, and expensive. How often do we arrive at airport security after a hot and uncomfortable journey by public transport to find that we still have some (or all) of our bottled water sill on us? Cue some industrial chugging at the screening entrance. I've seen transit passengers passing through Heathrow Airport having to discard expensive bottles of perfume bought abroad because they don't conform with UK rules on liquids.

I once had to give up a brand new can of shaving foam at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport because it was slightly sticking out of the clear bag my carry-on liquids were contained in. Less than 20 metres the other side of security, I had to fork out for the only shaving foam on sale, a luxury L'Oreal package in the duty free boutique. Ker-ching. Similarly, I also found that if you buy deodorants in American supermarkets, they come in supersized, 170ml containers, which led to me having one confiscated at Orly even though there was less than 100ml left in the container. In both experiences I learned my lesson. Other passengers, haven't, according to MAG who say they have removed bottles of HP Sauce, Marmite and snowglobes among other items from passengers at London Stanstead airport.

Some security experts have long been calling for the liquids restrictions to be lifted, arguing that terrorists are adaptable and will have long ago looked for alternative ways to see out their obsession with aviation targets. As Sky News revealed earlier this year, terrorists are highly proactive in their R&D activities (and just look at the 'shoe bomber' Richard Reid, the 'underpants bomber' Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Al-Qaeda's toner cartridge plot in 2010 - all examples of fiendish innovation). And as the attacks in Brussels and Istanbul this year have shown, people are just as vulnerable in public, landside areas of an airport than behind the airside security screening cordon.

Aviation figures, too, have also argued that the liquid restrictions do more harm than good, and the passenger frustration - and clearly the waste highlighted by MAG today - caused by the rules outweigh the small risk that someone might try and sneak through bomb-making chemicals in their toiletries.

All are compelling arguments, of course, but isn't a small risk still enough to warrant the inconvenience? Here in Paris we now have to accept being patted down at cinemas and having our bags inspected walking into shopping malls. Soldiers are visible on the streets with as much commonality people outside office entrances smoking. It shouldn't be, but it's the way of life we have to accept to live our lives while mitigating the risks of an attack.

Having to think hard about how much shampoo one might need for a weekend away (especially in a hotel where it is supplied...) is, for me a small price to pay for my safety. And there is always the option of checking-in luggage if you do need to travel with more and (the risk of lost luggage aside) you're prepared to wait a little longer at the other end for it to turn up. For now, perhaps it just needs some education: until the airport industry outfoxes the terrorist with R&D of its own that negates the need to throw 80 wheelie bins of plastic bottles away every day, passengers need to be better informed about what they can and can't take through airport. After all, they've only had a decade to learn why.

Whatsa Mata you? Hey, gotta no respect!

"Leave it, bruv, he ain't worth it"

This time last year I was promising myself that I wouldn't blog so much about José Mourinho and would concentrate more on his then-team's defence of the Premier League title. How wrong I was.

Inevitably, however, Chelsea's Community Shield encounter with Arsenal became all about Mourinho, or rather his mindgames with Arsène Wenger and the handshake that wasn't. But, hey, it was only a friendly and Eden Hazard's fluffed shot in front of recently transferred teammate Petr Čech meant nothing for the season about to unfold. Except that Chelsea's next game, against Swansea in the season's first league fixture (exactly a year ago today...), saw the Portuguese's ridiculous meltdown over Dr. Eva Carneiro. This subsequently led to a mental collapse within the team which ultimately resulted in Chelsea dropping to 16th place by December 17, followed by the manager's by-now predictable departure under "mutual consent".

There was, however, something of 'suicide-by-cop' about it all. Many were suspicious about Mourinho coming back to Chelsea in the first place, suggesting that it was only because the Manchester United job he so coveted was not available. Whether this is true, we can only now speculate, but certainly within a matter of days of Mourinho getting the heave-ho from Stamford Bridge, his PR machine was doing a sterling job in keeping him visible, with no shortage of hints that he would finally be on his way to Old Trafford (despite the hapless Louis van Gaal actually being in the job).

It didn't take people - and I single out Twitter people in particular here - many days, either, to start ringing the bell of doom for Juan Mata, the intelligent midfielder who'd won Chelsea's Player Of The Year award two seasons running before Mourinho packaged him off to Manchester citing spurious claims about the player's defensive ability. Poor thing, the Twitter wags snarked, no sooner has he settled at United than the man who unceremoniously sent him there comes after him.

So, fast-forward 12 months from my original vow. Mourinho is back at Wembley for the Community Shield but this time as manager of Manchester United, finally. He has just beaten defending Premier League champions Leicester with a 2-1 win secured by Zlatan Ibrahimovic - a classic Mourinho signing: inconsistent centre forward, getting on a bit, but deadly when the chance arises (viz Didier Drogba). To add to his hubris, he is on the cusp of signing Paul Pogba from Juventus for a fee reported to be £89 million or more. So, The Special One returns, with a special team at his disposal. Amongst it is Juan Mata.

At Wembley, the Spaniard sits patiently on the bench. Twitter notices his slightly forlorn look, the No.8 emblazoned on the left thigh of his shorts. In a forest of vanity squad numbers (first team players at AC Milan have shirt numbers in the 90s...), 8 remains the number of central midfield authority. At United it represents the legacy of Nicky Butt and Paul Ince and their presence, while at Chelsea, it is Frank Lampard and his imperious record of 211 goals from the position.

Jesse Lingard had, arguably, played the pivotal part in Manchester United returning to Wembley in the first place, substituting Mata in the FA Cup Final in May and scoring the winning goal that brought the curtain down on the van Gaal era with something of a wry smile. So, perhaps it was fitting - a reward, even - that the 23-year-old winger got the nod ahead of Mata for the 2016-17 curtain raiser. Mata, smart man that he is, probably saw this for what it was, too, but when Lingard came off injured in the 63rd minute, he was on. Exactly 30 minutes later he was off again...and looked furious.

Surprisingly, player petulance doesn't happen often as often as the back pages might suggest, but when it does, it usually shows more than intended. When a disgusted Diego Costa threw his training bib in Mourinho's direction last November after a touchline warm-up came to nothing at White Hart Lane, it was clear how bad the "palpable" disconnect was between manager and players. Mourinho was gone within a fortnight. The sight, then, of Mata being apparently restrained by United coach Ricardo Formosinho while shooting a look at his manager that definitely could kill underlined the precarious state of Mourinho's man management techniques, which failed him so dismally at Chelsea last season.

"I needed to take off the smallest player [Mata] because we were expecting a lot of long balls," Mourinho said, unconvincingly after the match, which ended just two minutes after the substitution. Now, some might see this as simply Mourinho shoring up his defence, a position consistent with his notorious 'win-at-any-cost' bus parking. Others might see this as Mourinho at his most insensitive and vindictive. "You don't do that unless you are trying to send a message," said pundit Danny Murphy on the BBC's Match Of The Day. "[Mourinho and Mata] have a lot of history at Chelsea and he has embarrassed him in front of his supporters and his family. He is basically saying to him you are not important and he has done it publicly. I can't see him still being at the club at the end of August."

Nor, probably, would Mata himself, who joins the likes of Bastian Schweinsteiger, Daley Blind and Marcos Rojo as casualities of the new United manager's apparently ruthless trimming of a squad he inherited from van Gaal. Mata, for the record, has remained remarkably sanguine and professional, posting pictures of himself with the Community Shield trophy on Facebook and Twitter.

There are arguments, however, that Mata never recovered the form he had at Chelsea since his-then club record £37.1 million transfer to Old Trafford in January 2014. He has, since then, only started 75 Premier League games for United, with suggestions coming out of Old Trafford that van Gaal shared Mourinho's concerns about the midfielder's pace and defensive contribution.

That, however, won't wash with Chelsea fans, who saw in Mata a clever, creative player who thoroughly deserved his consecutive player of the year awards, and whose intellect and articulate, cultural interest endeared him so. Before Mourinho's return to Chelsea in June 2013, Mata had been Chelsea's creative heart under André Villas-Boas, Roberto Di Matteo and Rafa Benitez, contributing goals and some vital assists. As "@BlueTaintedNick" put it on Twitter yesterday, "How many players left at peak and retained the affection like Mata?". The answer is not many, but they'd be led by Lampard, Drogba, Gianfranco Zola, Eidur Gudjohnsen and, without hesitation, Mata.

For all our affection for Mata, his relationship with Mourinho may simply be down to preference and chemistry. In Mourinho's case, Mata isn't his preference and, it is patently clear, there is no chemistry. But while Mourinho may have his tactical reasons for not favouring Spaniard, the way he has gone about expressing them - now twice - leaves much to be desired. Over three-and-a-bit and two-and-a-bit seasons, we sang the Special One's praises from the rafters of Stamford Bridge, on trains and planes to European destinations, and in the face of overwhelming evidence of his sociopathic tendencies. We defended him - rightly - from the massed ranks of envious trolls as we watched the silverware come tumbling in.

But now he's at Manchester United, do we turn on him, and especially over his treatment of a much-loved former Chelsea player? Probably, but that shouldn't come as any surprise. It's what the tribality of football demands.

Tomorrow never knew - The Beatles' Revolver turns 50

2016 will go down as the year that began with the death of a rock icon whom people actually believed held the universe together, and that the subsequent procession of celebrity departures, along with enormous political upheavals, has been down to his untimely demise. Those with their heads less buried in the clouds will just put this down to unfortunate circumstance. However, with 2016 being exactly 50 years on from 1966, there is an ornate sense of the circular going on, that somehow we're completing a cycle.

Because '66 was the year which, culturally, launched everything. And it was all thanks to four records: Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Blues Breakers with John Mayall and Eric Clapton, and The Beatles' Revolver.

Five decades on, this quartet - released within three months of each other - remain landmarks in the evolution of popular music: Dylan's for the dexterity of its writing, Blues Breakers for introducing the overdriven, amplified guitar that would shape rock music forever (see my post Breaking blues - the buddhas of suburbia from a couple of weeks ago), and Pet Sounds and Revolver - often seen as direct rivals - for taking pop music, pop music composition, pop music recording techniques and the manifestation of conceptual thinking in pop music to a totally different level.

The Beatles were in total awe of The Beach Boys, but Brian Wilson's masterpiece, released in May 1966, was itself something of a response to their own Rubber Soul, released the year before. While their next album wouldn't be an intentional tit-for-tat response, it was clear that with Revolver - along with Blonde On Blonde and Pet Sounds - mainstream pop was emerging into something else. The Elvis-inspired, stage-driven rock and roll that had breathed life into pop and which fuelled The Beatles at the Cavern and on the Reeperbahn had served its purpose. It was now about storytelling, about songcraft and expanding what was possible, and in The Beatles' case, turning the studio into an instrument in its own right.

Revolver was released 50 years ago today and has been quite rightly feted as pop's Great Leap Forward™. But quite why requires some examination: sequentially sandwiched in the Fab canon between Rubber Soul and the even greater opus of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, John Lennon and George Harrison both saw Revolver as Part 2 of a cycle that began with Rubber Soul. Lennon, typically more colourfully, branded Rubber Soul as "the pot album", but Revolver "the acid album", a clearly tongue in cheek reference to the creative stimuli applied in both.

Revolver was, however, far from simply a trip. Emboldened by their move away from trite Merseybeat on its predecessor, Revolver evolved John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison further as songwriters. And here is where it draws its greatest gasp. Incredibly, we're only talking three years after their debut album, Please Please Me, but Revolver brought maturity, a premature world-weariness, even. McCartney was already contemplating middle age (he'd turned 24 that June) and a life of semi-retirement dressed in tweed and a cloth cap; Lennon - genuinely horrified by the reaction to his 'bigger than Jesus' quip - looked to the studio as a means of escaping the frustrations of live performance (namely the screaming teens who drowned out their music) and somewhat replaced the raw energy of gigging that he'd enjoyed in the early days with the energy of writing without limits. George Martin played an enormous role here in indulging Lennon's whims, knowing full well that Lennon was a huge fan of The Goon Show, of whom Martin had worked on comedy albums with Peter Sellers, and whichnreflected The Goons' own unparalleled "theatre of the mind" inventivenes.

14 songs was a lot for an album in the mid-60s, when bands were churning them out every nine months or so before embarking on tours. But across these songs - some of The Beatles' very best - Revolver established a new role for what a pop band could talk about. On Taxman they took swipes at Harold Wilson's Labour government (one of Harrison's three contributions which reflected his own coming-of-age as a writer), explored Catholic themes with Eleanor Rigby and gave McCartney a platform to expand his musical palette - his whimsy on Here, There And Everywhere, the intentionally childishness of Yellow Submarine ("it's a children's song," he explained at the time) and his sunny disposition (in contrast to Lennon's cynicism) with Good Day Sunshine.

Revolver was unafraid to shoot in different directions - the Motown funk of Got To Get You Into My Life (a track, believe it or not, once covered by Joe Pesci sounding a lot like Neil Sedaka...), the West Coast jangle of Dr. Robert, the anti-pop of I'm Not Sleeping, the rockiness of She Said She Said, and the experimentation with Indian spiritualism on Love You To, creating narratives and soundscapes with sound effects and double-tracking techniques of the kind that progressive rock would build upon in the decade that followed. Actually, it's no great shock to discover that Revolver and Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon were recorded in the same Abbey Road studio, albeit six years apart. Perhaps, then, much of the genetic code in the Floyd's early work, and indeed others, like David Bowie, can be found buried like a time capsule in one song on Revolver, the one that ends the album: Tomorrow Never Knows.

If Revolver as a whole marked a turning point in the trajectory of rock music, Tomorrow Never Knows is the hinge. What had begun as a droning, single-chord song called Mark 1 - strummed by Lennon on an acoustic guitar for George Martin's approval - became one of the most acclaimed album tracks in music history, for its tripiness ("Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream - it is not dying") - which was more a reflection of Lennon's interest in meditation than references to LSD - and its sonic innovation. Using barely new studio equipment, loops of various noises, tracking, compression and a host of other techniques, Tomorrow Never Knows - named after yet another one of Ringo Starr's malapropisms - took listeners into a completely new world, one that beat-obsessed pop was probably not ready for. Lines like "Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void – it is shining." and "That you may see the meaning of within – it is being" were from another universe by comparison to "I wanna hold your hand" and "She loves you - Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!". But, to make the point again, it is truly incredible to think of how far The Beatles had travelled between these two sets of lyrics, and how music was taken along with it.

Revolver is, for many Beatles fans, their favourite, though trying to judge them all is a rabbit hole worth avoiding. There will always be merits to the breadth of Pepper, of gems like Julia, Dear Prudence and While My Guitar Gently Weeps on 'the white album', of the closure of Abbey Road and the blueprint for bluesy '70s album rock that was Let It Be (especially if you hear it in its original 'naked' state.

But Revolver remains my favourite for both what it was and what it did. Today, 50 years on, I can listen back to it - as someone who grew up long after The Beatles had disbanded (I was born the year after it was released) - and identify the source code of music I have cherished ever since I became musically of age. It really is that Biblical.

Is it the end of the Queen of the Skies' reign?

Picture: British Airways

Long before I ever experienced air travel for myself my imagination was captured by a photograph of my brother 'starfishing' inside the engine nacelle of one of the first ever Boeing 747s to arrive in Britain, 45 years ago. At the time the 747 was the largest passenger aircraft in the world and the idea of a plane so big it could carry 480 passengers was almost beyond comprehension, let alone the fact that its engines were large enough to allow someone to stand up in their cowlings.

Today, we take such things for granted. More than 100,000 commercial flights take off every day around the world, and whether long-haul or short-haul, the "jet age" is now a fairly old fashioned notion. In 1969, when the 747 first flew, it was still something for the privileged. But the 747 was soon to change that, bringing air travel to the masses. Today, airlines rely on planes designed for the fuel efficiency and function, rather than their romance, and with the rise of budget aviation, flying has become somewhat commoditised. But with a 'statement' aircraft like the Concorde no longer in service, and the majority of Boeings and Airbuses in use by the world's carriers little more than flying buses - air buses, if you will - bland, twin-engined toothpaste tube with wings designed to extract maximum bums-on-seats value, the 747 remains the only airliner to retain the glamour of the earliest days of the jet age.

Despite fewer airlines flying them today, the 747 still commands attention. It is still the plane you marvel at when you see it taking off, and if you're lucky enough to fly on one, there is still a 'moment' to be enjoyed when arriving at the departure gate and seeing that majestic brow (which always reminds me of Disney's butler in 101 Dalmatians...).

There are plenty of big planes - the rival Airbus A380, Boeing's own 777 and 787 - but in an era of trawlers, the 747 is an ocean liner, a grand vessel that stands apart from anything else at the airport, with pleasing curves and that distinct hump on top comprising the cockpit and the upper deck cabin.

Indeed, it is that top deck that still, 47 years after the 747 first flew commercially, still captures the sense of wonder. Just as Airbus have marketed showers, gyms and private cabins for the A380, in 1969 the upper deck of the 747 was portrayed as an exclusive lounge, accessible only by a spiral staircase that, in itself, appeared to be highly exotic. These days, most 747 operators airlines configure the top deck for business or premium economy seating, but there is still an innate sense of luxury if you do get the chance to climb those stairs (and if you get a window seat, you get your own personal locker space alongside you, courtesy of the unique curvature of the plane's cabin).

Luxuries like that aside, the 747 was always much more than a flying gin palace. Boeing's predecessor, the 707 had, along with the Douglas DC8, been the first four-engined, long-distance planes in commercial usage, and together they can be credited for creating mass air travel. But the 747, which doubled the capacity over the 707, opened long-haul travel for all, enabling airlines to transport close to well over 300 passengers (the modern 747 carries 384) in a single aircraft. Thus was born the 'jumbo jet'.

Sadly, however, the end is in sight for the 747. Boeing is considering ending production as orders for new planes dry up as airlines look to smaller, more fuel-efficient aircraft to fly on their high-capacity, long-haul routes. Currently Boeing, which has delivered 1522 of the planes since 1969, has just four net orders on its books, and for the cargo version only. Apart from the US government considering the 2011-introduced 747-8 model as a replacement for the ageing 747s currently used as 'Air Force One', the US president's world famous ride, production is being slowed to just six aircraft a year.

Picture: Boeing

Boeing, of course, is not alone - even Airbus is struggling to find customers for its 550-seat A380 - but while that plane may be one of the most comfortable I've ever flown in (for something so big, it takes off with the grace of a ballet dancer), it's stumpy, dumpy profile lacks any of the elegance of the 'Queen Of The Skies'.The 747 doesn't just look beautiful, it's a remarkably quick plane, too, cruising at around 550 miles per hour (Concorde may have flown almost three times as fast, but carried less than a quarter of the passengers). Pilots love to fly it and passengers still love to fly in it, even in economy, where it's high-sided walls give a sense of space lacking in many more modern long-haul jet designs. And despite its relative inefficiencies, the 747 remains popular with airlines, including Lufthansa, KLM.

Picture: British Airways

British Airways, for example, will continue to be one of the 747's biggest operators for a considerable time to come, with 40 of the -400 model flying to major destinations like New York (the original route of BOAC's first 747), Beijing and San Francisco.

BA insists that the 747’s day is far from done. Even with the airline introducing the A380 and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner alongside its Boeing 777s, the 747 is still considered the "backbone" of the airline's long-haul fleet, and will remain in operation until at least 2020.

Last September BA even announced a major refurbishment of its 747s, bringing interiors, seating and in-flight entertainment systems up to the same standard as its newer planes. The 747, BA said, continues to "hold a special place" in the hearts of its passengers. And I must admit, for me too. Like, I suspect, most people my age, my first flight outside of Europe was in a 747, and even after all these years, I'm still excited by the prospect of travelling in one.

More rational people will argue that once you're strapped into your seat, a plane's a plane. That may be true, but even knowing that, when I fly to Miami later this year it will be in a British Airways 747, a plane designed in the early 1960s and built in the late 1980s. And I will still be experiencing one of the most distinctive and distinct aeroplanes ever built, a classic, rather than an ultra-modern marvel. And that will suit me just fine.

Guess I picked the wrong week to give up drinking

Taking a plane was, once, an exercise in projected sophistication, where even the most proletariat of us felt like Cary Grant at the mere possession of a boarding pass. But that all changed when everyone decided to get in on it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: travel brings out the worst in everyone, rendering modern air travel considerably less of the glamfest it once was. Once you've survived the public humiliation of walking barefoot through a full body scanner, your beltless trousers displaying that you're too cheap to actually buy Calvin Klein underwear, you must then witness the utter desperation of "speedy boarding" as families leg it for the departure gate...despite being transferred to the plane by bus. This is then followed by gittish overhead locker space hogging (avoiding selling a kidney just to put a bag in the hold) before taking a seat in a row so tight even regularly-sized people need a boarding pass for each buttock. And all that before being charged the equivalent of Uruguay's national debt for a half tub of Pringles while suffering spine-shattering mid-air turbulence caused by global warming, which has itself been contributed to by all this flying.

Air travel is hell, so it's no surprise that people turn up for flights not-so elegantly wasted or break open their duty-free tequila as soon as the seatbelt signs are turned off. However, as bossy teachers (if I can use that brand) used to say, "there's always one who spoils it for the others". Actually, it's more than one - hen parties and rugby club tours, mostly, who seem unable to fly an hour or so on CheapyJet to Tallinn or Puerto Banus without first consuming a weekend's worth of grog before they've even left the airport bar. Which is not what airport bars are for.

Pre-flight drinking used to be part of the glamour. An exotic cocktail in the company of interesting, erudite international travellers, or a couple of strong ones to calm the nerves of the nervous flyer, or a romantic glass of champagne to get the honeymoon off to a gooey-eyed start. But, no. Despite airports being partially designed to encourage drinking via concourse bars and duty-free shops, the trouble is that too many people are availing themselves too much.

In February, a six-man stag party flying to Bratislava from Luton was arrested after brawling onboard the plane, leading to it being diverted to Berlin. A month later a group of 24 Irish men were thrown off a flight to Costa Rica after allegedly becoming "drunk and abusive" as it waited for takeoff at Gatwick Airport. In May a woman found to be "unresponsive" and slumped in her seat was ordered off an easyJet plane to Paphos before it had even left Manchester Airport...punching the pilot in the process, forcing the airline to replace him, delaying the flight further. And it's not just those 'turning right' at the aircraft door causing trouble: last December, Finnish dress designer Leena Romu attacked a flight attendant as she was boarding a Virgin plane to Dubai, "noticeably unsteady on her feet" and clutching bottles (plural) of duty-free. She was flying First Class.

By and large these are isolated incidents, but the increasing regularity with which they are being reported appears to be enough for Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Aviation, to decide to look into doing something about it. "If you’re a young family travelling on a plane you want to go from point A to B, you don’t want to be disrupted," Ahmad said last week (and good that the UK's aviation minister gets the concept of travelling from one place to another...). He does, though, have a point. "I don’t think we want to kill merriment altogether," he added, "but I think it’s important that passengers who board planes are also responsible and have a responsibility to other passengers, and that certainly should be the factor which we bear in mind."

In 30-plus years of frequent flying I've been rarely troubled by boozy passengers: there was my first ever long-haul flight, to Los Angeles, when I stupidly picked seat 52A of a Virgin Atlantic 747. Not only was I in the smoking section (remember those? Not fun on a 13-hour flight...), but I was sat next to a chain-smoking, G&T-guzzling bit-part actor heading home. He had a grand sounding name (and is still active - I've checked), who told me he'd been in the soap All My Children and episodes of Murder She Wrote. There very nearly was a murder in seat 52B as "Claude" continuously ordered more to drink as he rattled on about Angela Landsbury and Cabot Cove until, thankfully, passing out somewhere over Canada. That, and a pair of American technology salesmen (identified by their tan chinos, golf shirts and loud voices) sat in front of me on a recent British Airways flight from London to Paris, and managed to get loaded on tiny bottles of wine in just the 45 minutes we were in the air, is about it. Perhaps I've been lucky or, perhaps, these incidents have been blown out of proportion by the press. But police statistics obtained under a freedom of information request have shown that over the last two years more than 400 people have been arrested on suspicion of being drunk on flights in the UK.

Out of 250 million passengers handled by British airports each year, that may not sound a lot, but if one of those 400 disrupted your holiday, you'd be justifiably annoyed. And it's something the airlines themselves say needs to be tackled. It is certainly enough of a nuisance problem for the British Government to consider action. A first step would be identifying whether or not the current rules do enough to prevent a bit of fun turning into something more serious. Currently, bars at British airports are allowed to be open according to the earliest and latest flights of the day, a common practice at most airports around the world, and in the case of London's Gatwick, for example, means the taps are open as early as 4am for those departing on holiday flights.

Furthermore, airport bars are not subjected to the same licensing restrictions as pubs, bars and restaurants on the outside, and can, in theory, be open 24 hours a day. This, says Lord Ahmad, is something that "needs to be looked at". Last week the new UK Aviation Industry Code of Practice on Disruptive Passengers was published and included guidance to cabin crew that duty-free booze shouldn't be opened in-flight, and that terminal bars should stop selling alcohol to passengers showing signs of drunkeness (which, I thought, was already the case, along with check-in desk personnel being trained to spot - and smell - drunken behaviour). New rules will mean that any alcohol bought in duty-free shops should be stored on flights away from passengers or in bags that should remain sealed for the duration of the flight. At present, it would appear, nothing prevents sealed duty-free shopping from being opened once onboard.

"I don't think we want to kill merriment altogether," Ahmad said last week, adding that passengers do "have a responsibility to other passengers". Quite how far the government will go, however is - if you can excuse the pun - up in the air. Simon Calder, travel editor of The Independent, says that any action is unlikely to lead to an outright drinking ban at airports or on planes. "It won't happen with a straightforward booze ban", he told ITV's Good Morning Britain. "There'll be various techniques [the government] will be looking at, such as opening hours and restricting the number of drinks you can have. You may have to have your boarding card scanned or marked so you only have a couple of drinks." Breathalyzing passengers at risk of being drunk might be another possibility, Calder said, and it might be done "on a flight-by-flight basis", given that the same 'party' destinations crop up in the charge sheet of reported incidents.

"With air travel proving more popular than ever, and passenger numbers expected to rise across the whole of the UK in the coming years, now is the time to tackle this problem collectively," said Tim Alderslade, Chief Executive of the British Air Transport Association and Ed Anderson, Chairman of the Airport Operators Association, in a joint statement.

You can't knock their initiative, of course, or indeed the desire of airlines to tackle the problem. But equally you can't help feeling that it is a problem that, while the industry hasn't exactly created it, has certainly benefited from financially in both making air travel more available, and getting people to pay hansomely at airport bars for a few pints too many at Stupid O'Clock in the morning. Perhaps it is time to reign this in.