YESTERDAY EVENING: I’m outside the House of Commons with Bloggers4Labour supremo Andrew Regan, his sister, and another friend. We’re on our way to Andrew’s [very successful as it happened] Labour blogging meeting in one of the Commons committee rooms. As you’d expect in these Times Of Terror, every visitor gets scanned and searched. Naturally, I am about to embarrass my companions.
My rucksack comes out of the X-ray machine and I remember that I left my Swiss Army knife in there, a tool no snapper or geek should be without—except when passing through airport security.
HOUSE OF COMMONS SECURITY GUARD: Is that a knife in your bag, sir?
POOTERGEEK’S BRAINCELL: Oh shit.
POOTERGEEK: Er, yeah it is. Sorry about that. [hopefully] It’s a Swiss Army knife.
POOTERGEEK’S BRAINCELL: Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word “army”?
SECURITY GUARD: Would you mind removing it from your bag, please?
POOTERGEEK: [scrambling through main section of rucksack and depositing various strange items on the desk next to the scanner] I can’t seem to find it. Which part was it in?
SECURITY GUARD: [to colleague controlling display] Could you bring the one with the knife back up please?
POOTERGEEK: [looking at screen] Oh yeah. Thanks. It’s in the front compartment.
[POOTERGEEK removes knife and hands it to the SECURITY GUARD.]
[SECURITY GUARD returns knife to POOTERGEEK.]
POOTERGEEK: Don’t you want to keep it?
SECURITY GUARD: No. That’s fine. In you go.
And you being a dusky male of a certain age and all. I am highly disappointed in the state of Poodle Blair’s Muslimophobic racist police state.
Was it the tiny one with a nail file and integrated tweezers or a full-blooded one with a saw, corkscrew and “a thing for getting things out of horses feet”?
It was the in-between one, with the retractable MP gouger.
[…] our house of elected representatives. Hilariously, they stopped Damian, up ahead of me, noting that he appeared to have a knife in his bag. ‘Can we examine that, Sir’, they asked, sternly. His swiss army knife was duly […]