• AS ALWAYS, I’m looking forward to this year’s Royal International Air Tattoo, which is set for July 20-21.

For one thing, I’m a machinery junkie, so watching and listening as dirty great lumps of it hurtle about the sky is fantastic.

For another, I’m not single, so it doesn’t bother me that throughout every Riat, every ordinary man in every nearby town with at least one hotel might as well be invisible, thanks to the presence of suave aviators from across the globe.

If you happen to be a single man and invisibility bothers you during this period, I suggest you and your friends invest in flying suits from an army surplus shop. Then, during the weekend in question, pepper your conversation in public places with words and phrases such as ‘aileron’ and ‘trim characteristics’.

You might also want to start growing a moustache around about now. With a bit of luck, the women you try to chat up won’t themselves turn out to be pilots.

Riat promises the latest aircraft as well as classic examples, and better facilities for visitors than ever before. Naturally, there’ll also be plenty of flying displays, but I wish there could be some other displays to reflect the reality of most people’s experience of aviation.

That’s why I’ve decided to put together my own very special display team and tout for business from the organisers of public events across the country.

The Air Travel Reality Display team will have various routines with which to thrill the crowds. There’ll be one called Manners of a Pig, for example, in which carefully chosen actors will play the security staff of a major international airport. Characters will include a dozy, gum-popping officer who directs people to various security queues by barking numbers without so much as a ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, and generally behaves for all the world like the snotty 12-year-old he or she probably was when they could last be bothered going to school.

There will also be assorted uniformed louts who look like they spend their evenings alone in bedsits, reading Guns and Ammo magazine, and who shout “Keep walking!” rather than the more conventional: “This way, please.”

I don’t know where to recruit these actors, but something tells me I should try Luton.

In a fearsome manoeuvre called The Cram, meanwhile, my team will squash themselves into a mock-up of an airline cabin that gives each one less space than a veal calf, yet manage to extract 20 quid notes from their pockets and hand them to airline staff in exchange for a bag containing three peanuts.

The cabin mock-up will also be used for a manoeuvre called The Happy Fantasy.

One character will insist on reclining his seat, whereupon the person behind will remove their belt and use it as a garotte.

  • North Swindon MP Justin Tomlinson’s idea of a six-month probation after passing one’s driving test is a great idea.

He wants restrictions on night driving and carrying passengers, and an alcohol limit of zero.

I suggest there should also be restrictions on borrowing your mum’s Micra and pretending to be Vin Diesel, pictured, in The Fast and the Furious, and also on buying a knackered old car and adding a big-bore exhaust pipe to make the engine louder.

It’s a Fiesta, sunshine – we know you haven’t got a supercharged big-block V8 in there.

  • People living in Queen Elizabeth Drive are understandably unhappy at Thames Water’s plan to build two sewage storage tanks there.

If the water company presses ahead, I suggest it buys the residents’ houses at full price and then recoups the cost by renting them out to its executives.

I’m sure the firm would get back its outlay in no time.