Guide to age

Off to Tuscany for a family holiday with children, grandchildren, etc. We will all be safe from terrorists for a couple of weeks, but the holiday begins alarmingly. My elder daughter arrives at Stansted with husband and three children to find a group of armed police pursuing a man away from the airport building, screaming at him to stop. The fugitive is carrying a suitcase and running for his life. "It's cool. It's free television," says my seven-year-old grandson happily.

I leave separately from Coventry on a cheap flight to Pisa. An airline official offers me a seat with extra legroom for the price of £15, and I self-indulgently accept. The young man behind me in the queue, who is of Arab appearance and carrying three rucksacks, does the same, and we end up sitting next to each other on the plane by an emergency exit.

The young man goes to the toilet twice within half an hour, which makes me nervous. Then he gets up again and removes one of the rucksacks from the luggage compartment and starts fiddling about with it in front of his seat. Why did he want extra legroom? I wonder.

Eventually, he extracts a sinister-looking black box from the rucksack and starts fiddling with that. Slowly he begins to open it, and my heart stands still. Out of the box comes a round black object. It is a chocolate cupcake. As he munches it contentedly, I think what a fool I am, and I spend the rest of the journey making innocuous small talk and smiling a lot.

Arriving at Pisa, I buy an Italian newspaper. The main headline reads: "Inevitabile l'attacco alla City" Allarme della Polizia di Londra. This is based on a report in the Financial Times that has apparently quoted James Hart, head of the City of London police, as saying: "An attack on the City is inevitable: it is only a question of time."

I do wish that everyone would stop saying that terrorist attacks on London are inevitable. It is most disheartening, for it implies that nothing can be done to prevent them. All that dashing about by police officers with guns is pointless if the attacks are bound to take place anyway. And the person who has declared them to be inevitable must be suspected of having an interest in being proven right.

The truth is that practically nothing is inevitable, apart from the facts that we will all die one day and that an English local authority will at some time impose a hosepipe ban. Or at any rate, if other things are inevitable, we have no way of knowing that they are. It is beyond me why officials from the prime minister downwards seek to spread fatalism and despair by claiming to know things they cannot know.

The word "inevitable" is now much too casually used. A copy of the Daily Telegraph that I was reading during the flight to Pisa had as its main story a warning by English judges that the government's proposed relaxation of the licensing laws would cause "an inevitable explosion of alcohol-fuelled violence".

Lest their point wasn't clear enough, the Council of Circuit Judges went on to say that an escalation of crimes like "rape, grievous bodily harm and worse" would "inevitably be caused by the relaxation of liquor licensing which the government has now authorised".

Now, one doesn't have to be an admirer of the government to believe that it wouldn't deliberately seek to bring about an explosion of rape and murder throughout the land. It must think that there is at least a sporting chance that this can be avoided when 24-hour drinking is allowed.

Why are the judges so certain that the British, unlike the peoples of other nations, are doomed to behave like hoodlums if they are permitted to have a drink when they feel like it? The Home Office clearly doesn't think so. It thinks, on the contrary, that allowing pubs to open and close when they like could help to end the menace of "binge drinking".

Judges are supposed to be judicious, and their comments on this occasion were the opposite of that. But their irresponsible misuse of the word "inevitable" has yielded at least one benefit: it has discredited its use in other contexts as well. So we will be less inclined to take the police and the government seriously when they tell us that more bombs are inevitable, too.

Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't. Nobody knows. So might just as well relax a bit.