There's an old story about a couple who stripped off and made love on a crowded train while the rest of the passengers looked out of the window or hid behind their newspapers and pretended nothing was happening.

It was only when the couple lit up their cigarettes afterwards that it was pointed out to them, very forcibly, that they were in a non-smoking carriage.

Amanda Holt and David Machin must wish that their fellow passengers on the transatlantic flight on which they were overcome by passion had behaved like the people in that story. Instead they kicked up a fuss and called the cabin crew who in turn alerted the police at Manchester Airport when the pair, fuelled by rather a lot of drink, declined to stop their activities.

The outcome this week was that between them they had to pay £3,350 in fines and court costs, both have lost their jobs, and they and their spouses and families have been humiliated. If they had been drunken hooligans running amok up and down the aisles and threatening the safety of other travellers, they could hardly have fared worse.

They were guilty, certainly, of the moral sin of betrayal of their respective spouses. If their activities had been ignored, that would have been left to them to square with their consciences privately after they returned home and sobered up.

Instead, though, all the world now knows what they were up to and innocent people have been caused a lot of public distress.

It's not easy to predict how any of us would react if we were tired and trying to sleep on a plane and discovered that a passionate pair were thrashing about on a nearby seat.

But it does seem to me that what they were doing with each other, by mutual consent and not directly involving anyone else, hardly deserved the draconian treatment they received.

I like to think that enough of the old hippy in me has survived the batterings of the last couple of decades so that had I been on that plane I would have turned up the headphone volume for the in-flight movie or pulled my own blanket over my head and left them to get on with it.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.