I have a nice Martin guitar that has never been aboard an aircraft and won't ever be as long as it belongs to me. If I can't drive there, carrying the guitar with me into restaurants along the way as if it were a small child, it stays at home and I play somebody else's if I really want to play guitar.

One reason to play the mandolin, the fiddle, the flute or the whistle is that, even in its case, it usually passes the small-box test at the boarding gate. But security can be nauseating even with a "normal" instrument most people can identify in a police line-up.

At Dorval Airport, the security agent took the mandolin away to test it for "substances" (no explanation of what kind, of course) and of course found nothing but house dust and cat hair. At Pearson Airport in Toronto, the security agent told me to play it to prove it was mine. (I favoured him with eight bars of "The Rights of Man", while wondering why nobody else had to prove they owned their property.) At Heathrow, after we stood in line for hours and hours because it was about three weeks since the "liquid bomb" attempt of 2006, the security agent said he didn't care how small a mandolin is or where it would fit, it wasn't going in the cabin. (I wondered, but did not ask, whether he thought it was eight tiny garrottes travelling in disguise.)