‘Only one programme per person, I’m afraid’. ‘But I’ve got a friend joining me shortly,’ ‘I’m sorry, you can only have one programme,’ came the severe and final reply.

My friend joined me, programme in hand, then popped out to the loo. On her return, she was offered a programme… ‘It’s OK I’ve got one…’ she explained. ‘You can’t go in without a programme.’ ‘But I’ve got one on my seat!’ she tried to explain. ‘There aren’t any on the seats. You’ll have to take one,’ the volunteer insisted, glancing at the growing line of bemused people. ‘But I don’t need another...’ ‘You must take a programme,’ she said crossly, waving one in my friend’s face. Rather than hold up the queue any longer, she took another programme.

‘Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men,’ claimed Douglas Bader, quoting Harry Day, a first world war fighting ace. But the dilemma about one how slavishly one should follow the rules has been with us a lot longer – the saying can be traced to at least 500BC.

The trouble is that once you abandon the rules it becomes impossible to determine where the line is. We can all cite examples (like that above) where following a rule too closely becomes absurd – but you are then left with the realisation that once you have abandoned that certainty you’re on your own. Nothing is fixed.

“…You must be a pirate for the Pirate’s Code to apply...and the code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules,” Barbossa said as he welcomed Elizabeth Turner aboard the Black Pearl. More than once the plot turns on who interprets the code and whether they are rules or guidelines.

I once had the privilege of working for an organisation that worked with some of the country’s most difficult and troubled children. Among them, a small number of young people who had been convicted as perpetrators of violent sex crimes against other very young children. It was hard not to feel abhorrence for what they had done and the lasting, if not permanent damage they had inflicted on other vulnerable young lives. But when one heard their stories and the troubled childhood they had suffered, the damage that had been done to them when they were young, one’s abhorrence turned to pity. We all have some sympathy for the victims of such crimes, and are rightly troubled by recent reports that sexual exploitation of young people may have been disturbingly widespread in the football world. It takes a very courageous abandonment of the normal rules to feel sympathy for the perpetrators. And once you begin, where do you draw the line?

It’s certainly much easier to stick to the rules and give out just one programme to everyone than have to decide each time the right thing for yourself.