WELL, I don't think I'd mind ID cards really. In fact, as someone who has on occasions forgotten my own name, it could be quite useful - in moments of blank panic, a quick look at that piece of plastic would soon tell me who I was. Very reassuring.

Would make my purse a bit lighter too - as it bulges with all those other cards that tell the world who am.

The introduction of ID cards might even make our streets a little safer on Friday nights. Right now, they are crowded with rowdy drunks, many of them underage. Landlords say, with some justification, that they have no way of telling if the sophisticated young person in front of them is 13 or 19. Half of them have got fake ID anyway.

If we all had to carry official ID - and they're talking fingerprints and eye markings too - then kids might find it a bit more difficult to get served and there might be fewer 15-year-olds lying wrecked in the gutter. Which has to make the world a better place.

Despite the opposition to cards, it's hard to get worked up about our civil liberties. After all, Big Brother has already been watching us for a long time.

There are cameras in stores, in car parks, in most town centres. Computer records can give instant access to so much information about us, from our illnesses to money transactions to what we bought at the supermarket to what books we might like to buy and even who we phoned to tell them about it.

Our calls are recorded "for training purposes", companies buy our names and addresses to send us junk mail, tailored to what they think we might fall for, and credit agencies keep careful track of what we've borrowed from whom and whether we've paid it back.

Complete strangers know so much about us, that surely an ID card is going to make precious little difference.

We already carry a stack of ID around with us already - driving licences , store and credit cards. Which, conversely, makes it harder for people who don't have these things. They're the poor souls who have to trog along with their electricity bills or council tax demands to prove who they are. Tricky in many cases - our bills are all addressed to my husband, so that doesn't prove anything.

But the new ID cards would be unlike anything we've had before. At the moment, I carry 17 plastic cards in my purse, everything from a gold credit card to a Morrissons Miles petrol card. And that's not counting the unused store cards shoved behind the microwave. Wouldn't it be easier if all that information was on just one card? If nothing else, it would save me a fortune on purses.

The real downside is that cards get lost. Between them, my sons must keep the plastic industry in business in replacing lost bank cards In the event of a national identity card they would be permanently nameless, stateless and under suspicion.

Maybe we should just all be micro-chipped at birth. It would do away with the need for identity cards, loyalty cards, Metropole Snooker Club cards, passports, money and even Morrisons Miles Just stand in front of the scanner, sir. That will do nicely.

STILL with identity..I have nothing but praise for Richmond School. However, over the years I must have written them well over a hundred cheques, for school trips and outings, charity appeals, lost books. Every single one has been in my name from my account.

So what happens when they want to send me a refund for a cancelled field trip? That's right - they made the cheque out to my husband.

A BLACK teacher driven to a nervous breakdown by racist taunts from pupils has been awarded £45,000 in damages.

Which caused me an immediate pang of guilt as I recalled Ailsa McCrae who taught us when I was about 13, a particularly unpleasant age. Miss McCrae had an almost incomprehensible Scottish accent, which we horrible third-formers mocked mercilessly until the day Miss McCrae slammed her desk lid down, gazed at us with eyes of fire and berated us a "verra verra silly little girrrrls"

After that , we shut up and began listening to what she actually said instead of the way she said it. We felt not a whit guilty back then - mocking teachers was part of a long tradition. As far as we were concerned, they had to learn to cope. Most, like Miss McCrae, did.

Of course, this compensation lark might not yet be finished. The school where the black teacher was taunted was so dire and inefficient that it has since been closed down.

Wait for it - any day now, those racist pupils could sue the teachers for failing to provide them with an adequate education.

THERE are times when royalty is very reassuring. There was Prince Charles telling the world that Prince William never gets up in the morning. On the day of his 19th birthday, apparently, he was still in bed at 2.30pm.

For those of us with teenage sons who inhabit parallel universes in totally different time zones, the fact that not even a future king can get his son out of bed before midday, is strangely comforting,.

VICTORIA Beckham told Woman's Hour yesterday that she has "quite a shy personality really."

Gosh., Doesn't she hide it well.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/news/ griffiths.html

Dear Sharon

How refreshing to read your usual common sense. I do not wish to take anything away from the dreadful events in America, but I think we've had enough.

Why do they keep showing the film of the plane crashing into the towers? How awful it must be for the relatives of the people who were on it.

Until there is aware or some action which directly involves us, the best thing we can do is carry on enjoying life and show these terrorists that they haven't won.

Mrs J Bentley,

Darlington.

Dear Sharon

In the last war, my three older brothers were on active service and my sister was an army nurse.

Looking back, I don't know how my mother kept going, but she did. Every thing she said seemed to start with "Just because there's a war on..." as she told me off for not doing my homework or not helping round the house.

I realise now that being constantly busy was her way of keeping depression at bay, when she must have been worried sick. She had no time for the doom and gloom merchants.

"Business as usual" was our watchword then and we must keep going now, otherwise the terrorists will have won.

Joan Ellis,

Darlington.

Published: Wednesday, September 26, 2001