Burtdad's been over, recently, and boy, what joys he experienced at the border...

With the threat of utterly unlawful biometric Hell ID being thrust upon him, thoroughly infringing his right to travel (as enshrined in many conventions and laws), he found that there was just one company still not using it, and skimmed into Europe on the last whisper of freedom and sanity (at least for now).

But it wasn't until his trip back that the reality of the UK's border really came to light. And I'm not talking about the blatantly orchestrated muslim invasion, either. I'm just talking about the idiots at the port.

What passes for the UK border farce, these days, appears to be fresh-outta-school children with no idea what they're doing, whose main assignment isn't interrogating undocumented immigrants or stopping those famous boats, but just hassling natives with valid passports and travel tickets, on their way home.

I know this from my own travel to the island, in recent times, when I was stopped by a diminutive plod who couldn't look me in the eye as he tried to remember his questions, and then couldn't remember which side of the channel we were on, and proceeded to ask me, upon arriving in England, how long I would be staying in Czech Republic. I suppose it was 7am, but still. Get it together.

When it was Burtdad's turn, the tin-toothed brat asked Burtdad, a British passport holder, to prove that he had been on vacation by showing photos from his visit. We're talking about the inbound trip, here, when he's already been to Czech. This is the kid who wants to know why he's been away, not why he's going away. He showed a photo of a church, which could have been anywhere at all, and the useless twonk accepted this as proof of his vacation. So that was pointless.

But it gets better.

In their professional and expert capacity as protectors of the national border, the three morons set about searching his van for illegal items, and successfully failed to notice the unsheathed machete and crossbow he in his main cupboard. I mean... what the fuck were they looking for, that they didn't notice a machete?

And it's not a one-time mistake of epic proportions, either. On my last trip, they were so concerned about moving non-flammable oil from one plastic container (where it posed a fire risk) to another plastic container (where it was obviously completely safe), that they failed to take note of my entire tool cupboard, which contained, among other things, a hatchet, numerous large blades, and a box of- well, and some other stuff I'd forgotten to remove before heading over. And after I'd emptied my fuel cans into the fuel tank, making the relatively inert mixture safe, they had no interest in the large bottle of compressed and extremely flammable gas that I had in plain sight, connected to my cooker.

And they want you to believe a fingerprint machine is going to stop illegal immigration. I could have had a family of terrorists sitting on the bed and I doubt they would have noticed, while they were obsessing about whether or not I was visiting my home country on a native passport for a pre-defined reason they would accept.

I s'pose you have to laugh.