…well, he caught the small Swiss Army knife in my ruck as it went through the hand luggage scanner at Stansted airport last week. Took me and Mrs Legion out of the line and searched that ruck very thoroughly and very publicly. It must have taken about 30 minutes going through everything I had in there. Of course, I thought I only had a couple of books, mobile phone, steroid cream (strangely stubborn finger infection), eye glasses, boiled sweets, jumper (it gets chilly on planes), binoculars, camera and calculator.
I obviously didn’t realize that I had this really neat Swiss Army knife in there. Ahmed, to his credit, was pretty cool about it. Once he had established that I had not packed the knife in order to attempt to gain control of the aircraft, he just tossed it into a bin. It took a while before me and Mrs Legion understood from Ahmed’s, not to put to fine a point on it, halting English, that I would not be getting the knife back. It would, apparently, be joining with the souls of all other confiscated items in the purity of fire. I took this to mean it would be incinerated along with the many nail clippers and AK47’s already in the bin. Fine. My stupid fault for not checking the ruck for stuff like this.
Anyway, as Ahmed shoved his hand deep into the ruck’s darkest corners for a last rummage, he happened to be looking at me straight in the eye. His eyes briefly widened before he broke our gaze and looked into the ruck. My heart stopped as slowly, very slowly, his eyes returned to mine. Suddenly his eyes didn’t have the look of eyes that were merely confronting a stupid tourist. They had taken on a certain squint, a squint that I can only describe as a “gotcha” squint. He repeated a question he had asked earlier, something about had I packed the ruck myself and had I left it unattended at any time.
I tell you now, I shit myself. I didn’t know what to say for the best. Say no and I’m going to get a full body search and miss the flight, say yes and take the chance he’s found something stupider than the Swiss Army knife. I said yes.
That’s when Ahmed began laughing like a maniac and whipped his hand from my ruck to reveal…a box of tampons! He was waving it about like it was some fucking rabbit he had magically pulled from a hat.
Later, on the plane, Mrs Legion admitted that in a last minute, things that might be needed, packing frenzy, she couldn’t be arsed to undo a suitcase and had just shoved the box of tampons into the bottom of my ruck.
The moral of this story is that you should never leave your bags unattended, especially at home when your crazy wife has access to them.