DO you know who I am? Probably not, and sometimes it's hard to prove it. Especially if you're trying to hire a carpet shampooer.

I once got onto a wonderful tangle in Safeway because I couldn't prove who I was. Even though my name and picture are at the top of this page, it wasn't enough. They wouldn't let me have the shampooer, which explains why my sitting room carpet's still got wine stains from Christmas.

It's my own fault, I know, because I use two names - surely not that unusual in these liberated days? So my passport has both names, but no address. My credit cards and driving licences say one name, and even though I'm the one who signs the cheques, the gas and electricity boards - such sweet old fashioned organisations - send the bills to my husband.

So, on balance, a national ID card would solve a lot of problems for me, as it would for people who don't drive or go abroad and therefore have no driver's licence or passport.

As far as officialdom is concerned, people like that might as well not exist. If you rent a service flat, where gas and electricity are included, you have no bills and, as far as some companies are concerned, no existence.

And it's getting harder. Anyone trying to open a new bank account now, even if they already have an account there, has to jump through so many identifying hoops.

Home Secretary David Blunkett is very keen to get us all to carry ID cards. He hopes to get the laws through this year and to charge us £40 a throw. Civil liberties groups hate the idea. Continentals, who nearly all carry ID cards, are bemused at the fuss.

There are problems with ID cards, of course, and more practical ones than the threats to our freedoms or the thought of a police state.

For a start, we'll lose them. Repeatedly. Senior Son is already on his third driving licence and about his tenth bank card.

Or we'll break them, again, like Senior Son, trying to open a locked door the way they do on The Bill.

Or they'll be in the other purse/bag/jacket pocket or behind the bread bin.

They will keep thousands of jobsworths in blissful business. They will probably do nothing at all to prevent illegal immigrants, terrorists or asylum seekers - if the Government can make them, then so can forgers. Forging them might well open up a whole new sector for enterprising criminals.

They might make some of us feel that the world of 1984 is creeping ever closer. But they might help non-driving, stay-at-home customers get a better bank account. And Safeway might let me hire a carpet shampooer.

Giving a whole new meaning to 'call waiting'

"IF your call concerns a computer, press one; a television, press two; a laptop, press three..." "Your call is very important to us. Your call is held in a queue. You are currently number 5, 796."

The average person will apparently spend 53 hours in a lifetime trying to get through to telephone call centres.

Unless, of course, your call is trying to claim on a Mastercare extended warranty. In which case, you could probably spend that long in a week.

It took me six months, hours of phone calls, e-mails, letters and faxes, and much head-banging teeth-clenching frustration, to get a computer printer replaced. It took four months to get a mini hi-fi, and now the laptop's on the blink.

If I'm not here next week, then I'll probably still be on the phone.

IF the fit and active carry on working till they're 70, then who's going to staff the Oxfam shops, do Meals on Wheels, push hospital trolleys, look after village halls, run committees and chauffeur even older people to doctors and hospital appointments?

Grey-haired grown-ups are the mainstay of much of this country's charitable work. If they're still working for money, then the rest of us are going to be a lot poorer.

INSTEAD of bottled mineral water, some top restaurants and hotels are charging £4.50 a litre for filtered tap water.

That's nothing new. Thirty years ago, when I worked in the Coatham Hotel in Redcar, whenever a customer requested bottled water, we just filled an old Malvern bottle from the kitchen tap. Mind you, the sand in the bottom was a bit of a giveaway.

Published: 09/07/2003