SERVES me right for wearing an under-wired bra. Being subjected to a detailed inspection of my upper underwear in full view of fellow travellers at an international airport was the price to be paid for falling foul of super-sensitive security scanners.

That and wearing a silver bangle on one arm and a couple of bracelets on the other. So if you want to go through airport security without someone fumbling round your boobs and pulling down your waistband to inspect your knickers in the manner of a teenage fumble behind the bike sheds, then you might as well have no clothes on. And you certainly shouldn’t be audacious enough to wear jewellery. All that bling just makes the scanners ping – how on earth do the gold-chain encrusted, fake-tan infested manage as they flit back and forth between Magaluf and Chavland, I wonder?

It wouldn’t be so bad if every airport security scanner was the same. But they’re not. When we flew from Manchester to spend a night in New York (yes, just one night – long story and you’d need a week off for me to tell it so I won’t bother…) we breezed through with nary a buzz. Actually, I’m lying.

The first scanner in the new, slickly operated security hall in Terminal 2, had a bit of a thing about my heavy metal and I was directed to the whole body scanner, where you put your hands up to your ears rather like the starting stance for a good old ‘down, down deeper and down’ boogie session with Status Quo.

Which was absolutely fine by me, because no one had a fiddle with my bra strap. In reality, although it’s a tad humiliating I don’t actually have a problem with all this security stuff – after all, someone having a furkle around your privates is infinitely preferable to bits of you ending up on a mortuary slab – but I do wish it was consistent.

For surmounting the security hurdles at Newark in New Jersey the following day was a whole different ball game to the easy glide-through we’d experienced at Manchester.

And it’s not just negotiating security either that gives me yet another reason not to enjoy flying. Getting through US immigration is an object lesson in good behaviour and keeping your mouth shut unless spoken to, especially if you’re my 16-year-old who has an unfortunate penchant for cracking inappropriate jokes about Kalashnikovs and checked headgear.

I hate it every time, not least because a couple of years ago I was hauled in front of senior immigration officials because my fingerprints didn’t confirm to them that they belonged to me. Turned out it was something to do with lanolin in hand cream that makes your finger ends seem a bit dodgy as it happens, but coming under the eagle eye of officials to enter the land of the bald eagle still makes me nervous.

Yet this time one showed his human side. At the next booth to us he kept a family waiting with a hard stare then busily tapped the keyboard of his computer. But we could see he wasn’t plumbing the depths of a vast security database – no, he was writing an email to a friend which began: “I’m sooooooo BORED…”

• FINALLY, thanks to my new-found friends at York Writers’ Circle for making me so welcome when I attended one of their meetings the other day. They had asked me to pop along to listen to their written creations then chat about my times past as a newshound, and very friendly they were too. Not to mention talented – some of the words they had penned were truly evocative and spellbinding.

Which just goes to show that good writings are not the preserve of intellects on highbrow newspapers or Mann Booker aspirants, but are just as likely to be found in a church hall in York.

The ability to read and write is a wonderful tool, but the best components of that tool are actual words – words that we can tease and coax and bend to paint any picture we want of the world around us.

When I was a child I had a great uncle who was the headmaster of a school in the tradition of RF Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days, and I used to listen and watch agog as he wove pictures with his conversations and writings.

“Make the words work for you,” he used to tell me. “Because then you’ll be in charge of your destiny, and your world will become whatever you want it to be.”