The parents who accidentally left one of their five children behind at the airport “may be charged with negligence”, the police say. But that's not how it's meant to end, is it? We've all seen Home Alone. What's meant to happen is that the overlooked minor (in this case a four-year-old girl, found in the departures lounge in Tel Aviv shortly after the rest of her family got airborne for Paris) precociously fends for herself for a while.

She puts a wash on and does a shop. She revels in the unprecedented freedom to roam in her elder brother's bedroom and her parents' bathroom. She then sees off two sinister but blessedly incompetent intruders, mostly using marbles. She also usefully discovers that the elderly man who lives over the road isn't, in fact, a shovel-wielding psychopath but is a sensitive community member with a touching, neglect-based story of his own.

Meanwhile, the parents, belatedly aware that their travelling party is a child light, scramble home by all means necessary, including hitch-hiking with a travelling klezmer band. (More prosaically, the four-year-old flew on to Paris with an attendant on the next available flight.) Then there is a climactic reunion scene in which we all learn the valuable life lesson that being the youngest is tough, but that just because Mummy and Daddy and the rest of the family occasionally go on holiday without you, it doesn't mean they don't love you.

There was, as I recall, no negligence case at the end of Home Alone. There was, instead, a mother, bursting into the hall and operatically shouting: “Kevin?” and then lots of hugging. Still, given that it doesn't always pan out this way, it might be best if all travelling families take this opportunity to reacquaint themselves with the handy traveller's pre-departure mantra: “Passport, tickets, children.”

A deadly punch

Having counted your children at the airport, you might want to run a further check on their carry-on baggage, saving time and potential embarrassment farther down the line. Last year, at Stansted, the X-ray machine revealed the startling presence in my 11-year-old's backpack of a 10in screwdriver. The explanation for this seeming act of juvenile weapon smuggling was not terrorism but unresolved home storage issues. (The backpack had recently spent some time in a cupboard under the stairs, in which sundry loose household items are kept on a “throw it in and slam the door before it comes back out” basis.) But it sounds no more convincing now than it did then, explained, from behind a weak smile, to an airport security officer.

There was, then, inevitably some consternation, a few days ago, when the same bag, in the possession of the same 11-year-old and in an almost identical setting, was again hauled off the rubber conveyor belt for a manual inspection. What this time? The Hoover?

In fact, the man monitoring the scanner had detected the presence of the cover-mounted giveaway on the August edition of The Simpsons Comic - a tiny, almost flat, plastic model of a boxing glove on a trigger-operated spring, creating a miniature and spectacularly ineffectual version of the famous, automated “bopping” device seen in cartoons since time immemorial. Like knives, firearms and dispensers of shower gel in excess of 100ml, plastic bopping devices, no matter how ineffectual, may no longer be taken on board aircraft. The offending free gift was solemnly detached from the comic by a security officer - very carefully, I have to say, and without ripping the comic's cover - and I had to sign a form confirming its confiscation.

It's probably true that one could have caused more reckless endangerment to the flight that we were about to board by rolling up the comic and using it as a poker. Or, indeed, by swinging the backpack itself. At the same time, the regulations are there for a reason, and I, for one, find it reassuring to know that our planes and all who travel on them are safe from poor-quality slapstick.

The hiss in history

It's 75 years since Radio Luxembourg was founded and 16 years since it packed up, but the memories linger on: memories of the disc jockeys who peopled its studios, obviously (the station that gave us both Mike Read and Timmy Mallett will clearly for ever occupy its own proud niche in the history of the culture). But, more particularly, memories of the interference that made listening to the station such a unique and poignant challenge.

In the early evening, the medium-wave signal would swim in and out of Norwegian news bulletins, Danish shipping forecasts and giant tides of Russian static, lending pop music an exotic remoteness that it would never know again after the dawn of the crystal-clear FM era, while also providing invaluable training for the onset of tinnitus in middle age. We salute it.

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