SO YOU think you are as free as a bird - free to roam the globe in anonymity, safe in the knowledge that no one has anything on you. Think again.
Only if you were born and brought up unbeknown to the world in the darkness of deepest Dalby Forest, scratching a living from the land and wearing only fox skins would you be truly a non-person. The foxes would have to be hunted with bow and arrow, of course, not by hound.
Which is why I cannot understand all the fuss about identity cards. Believe me, someone, somewhere has on record more about you than you can remember yourself.
From the minute you emerge screaming from the womb and trying to get back in to safety, the paper trail - an electronic one, these days - begins.
Before you can open your eyes and ask for milk and rusks, you have a birth certificate and National Insurance number slapped on you. Your details go into Big Brother's computers. That's why babies cry so much. They have an idea of what is in store.
When you start school, the recording process continues. Its tentacles spread, entangle and suffocate you when you open a bank account, go to university, apply for a driving licence or a bus pass, get a job or need benefits because you have not got a job.
Apply for a bank loan or a mortgage, or get a passport for your holidays in Mablethorpe, and they get you again.
Go into any store and give them your postcode to make a credit purchase and within a blink of a microchip eye they know your name, house number, inside leg measurement and sexual preferences.
You are stripped naked, blushing and mentally covering your rude bits at the head of a queue of sniggering shoppers. Then they have to confirm your identity by reading out all your embarrassing Christian names: "Are you William Sebastian Bonaparte Fitzgerald Hearld?" Titter, titter.
And if you carry out a crime, well. Let's say you commit the heinous sin of dropping a cigarette end in the street in York. You are collared by the fag-end squad, handcuffed and detained in city council cells, beaten, tortured then fined. If you can be persuaded to rat on a colleague, they go easier on you. "Please remove the electrodes from my nether regions. I'll tell you everything. I've seen my boss drop a cigarette in Walmgate. He does it all the time. No he doesn't smoke, he just does it for fun."
But it is the evil record that's the worst. It's there for ever. It blights your life. It bars you from membership of the Rotary Club or the WI. They send it round all the pubs where it is pinned up in the snug to shame you.
Trouble is, you need all this to live a normal life, these days. Have you ever tried to buy something for a few hundred pounds without proof of identity? "Passport or driving licence, sir?"
"Sorry, I don't drive and I never go abroad. I might be able to find a gas bill in the loft, but I want to take my new toy now."
Not all of this is recent, either. Ten years ago, I sold a car and assured the private buyer there was no outstanding finance on it. "I know, I've checked on the computer," smirked the smug buyer. I'm pleased now I didn't tell him about the faulty brakes.
So what's wrong with ID cards if you have nothing to hide? OK, we all have something to hide. My wife still thinks I was working last Wednesday night. But I'm sure that if she went on the Internet she'd find my bar bill from the Red Lion.
You carry some form of ID wherever you go. And an official one, bearing a picture, could make life so much easier. Shown with every credit card purchase, official ID would cut down on fraud; or it could prove you are a pensioner when you want an old fogey discount on bus fares or meals. It would also save me having to prove I'm over 18 every time I want a drink.
It might even make things tougher for terrorists or criminals, though they are sophisticated enough nowadays to create their own genuine fake.
If you want out of this life, ask your parents to have you in Dalby Forest and leave you to be brought up by the apes. Then you can swing through the trees and eat your bananas without a computerised care in the world.
Updated: 10:36 Tuesday, February 22, 2005
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