Isn’t it about time we stopped kidding ourselves?

I’ve done a fair bit of travelling this year, and I’m beginning to wonder how many more times I’m going to be able to take a plane without becoming one of those people who gets dragged off by security staff, shrieking and in handcuffs, before it’s even left the tarmac.

It’s not that I have a fear of flying. It’s that I have a very strong aversion to bullshit. In this case, the fake sense of security provided by the safety briefing.

I blame Norwegian Air. Their ridiculous animated version takes the whole thing to the ultimate pinnacle of farce. The happy smiles of the mother and child as they go calmly through the evacuation procedure make the whole thing seem like just another fun ride at Disneyland. This is so clearly not an emergency. Let’s face it, in the real world the two of them would most likely be screaming while other passengers trampled over them in their eagerness to escape.

But it’s not just Norwegian who are at fault.

This is a Ryanair safety card. The three pictograms centre left, showing things prohibited during an emergency landing, represent:

• false teeth and glasses
• high heels
• earrings

Srsly? The plane’s coming down at an insane angle, the alarms are shrieking, the passengers are hysterical and you expect me to remember to take my earrings out?

And then there’s my favourite bit, when the stewardess says “In the unlikely event of the plane landing on water…” and then proceeds to tell you how to put a life jacket on while you think about the emails you forgot to send before you turned your phone off. No. Let’s have the truth. Let’s have her saying “In the unlikely event of the plane landing on water, we’re all going to die horribly”. I don’t know about you, but I’d happily pay more for my ticket just to hear that in a safety briefing.

Of course there is a possibility that this honesty might put people off flying. Which would be an excellent outcome, given that we need to be reducing the number of flights we take. In any case, flying is actually an incredibly safe means of transport. We don’t need safety briefings when we’re flying. Do we have a safety briefing when we get in a car, stressed and tired and distracted, and drive ourselves down a crowded motorway at 130 kph, surrounded by people who aren’t very good drivers even when they are sober, in vehicles that last saw a mechanic six months or more ago? And yet in the really quite likely event of the car bouncing off the crash barriers and spinning across three lanes of traffic, would you know what to do? Well, die, obviously.

Because we do stupid, dangerous things every day. And yet in the modern world we somehow think that we’re protected from them just because we’ve got ABS and animated smiling mothers and children and a safety briefing that wouldn’t help us even if we did listen to it because people panic and explosive decompression doesn’t leave you much time to pass the straps twice around your waist.

And let’s not forget that we’re only on the plane because we’ve tacitly agreed to the paper-thin illusion that security scans actually prevent terrorism. Yet I can think of a handful of ways that I could cause chaos in an airport or on a plane, even with much stricter security procedures.

If people accepted the possible consequences of their actions, then the world would be a much better place.

On 23 June, the jingoism constantly hosed over the British population by the likes of the Sun newspaper will finally have its inevitable result and the UK will vote to leave the EU. A dose of realism right now might save us all.