I read a science-fiction story yesterday.

It was about a nightmarish future world in which people were so suspicious of each other that the police were apt to be covertly called at the drop of a hat, and anything considered out of the ordinary - in the case in this story, a man with two women of an apparently different ethnicity - was worthy of immediate and very public investigation.

Sorry, I've got that wrong. It wasn't a science fiction story, it was the front page of yesterday's T&A.

It's not often I'm gobsmacked by stuff I read in my own paper, apart from on the letters page, but this is a story that completely stopped me in my tracks.

For anyone who didn't see yesterday's paper, the article concerned a Bingley man, Paul Wrightson, who was visiting Pizza Hut with his daughters Asha, 15 and Sonia, 13. As they were eating their meal, two Police Community Support Officers entered the restaurant. One of these community coppers asked Mr Wrightson to step outside and the other quizzed the girls.

The reason? Mr Wrightson is white and, due to his 19-year-marriage to a British Asian woman, has three dual-heritage children.

If there could be anything worse than a father separated from his children in public view and questioned as to his relationship with them, it can only be that a "concerned member of the public" took the trouble to call the police and pass on their worry that a white man in his 40s was in the company of two teenage girls who appeared Asian.

I struggle to understand what exactly caused so much concern within someone that they would actually call the police over this.

Have we come so little distance since a bunch of folk in Hartlepool hanged a monkey that came over on a ship because they didn't know what it was and suspected it was a French spy?

Is it so abhorrent and alien to us that three people of apparently different ethnic backgrounds might have a legitimate reason for being together?

Was it the sight of a man with girls who were so much younger? The fact that he was obviously white and they weren't? That there were two girls and one man?

God knows what goes through the minds of some people, but if Mr Wrightson actually had been someone who was up to no good then it beggars belief that he might choose to do it in a Pizza Hut in the middle of Bingley.

That the police actually sent someone in to the restaurant to check this out astounds me even further.

Bingley Police have quite rightly apologised to Mr Wrightson, but it seems more than a little surprising that when stories about of police taking hours to turn up to crime scenes, if it all, they can find time to act upon one telephone call and separate a man and his daughters in the time it takes to eat a pizza.

I am now more than a little concerned about what might happen the next time I take my children to the park. I am dark-haired, you see, and they are both fair-headed. Should I be expecting a visit from Bradford's finest the next time I'm out? Had I better take my driving licence and their birth certificates with me?

At least one good thing has come out of all this. The next time you are worried that there's a burglar in the house or if someone breaks into your car, all you need to do is call the police and tell them that there's a middle-aged white man with two young Asian girls on your street, and they'll be round like a shot.