oh how we laughed
About a year ago, misterballoons and I were invited to go and stay with some friends in Prague.

A few weeks previous, mister realised that his passport had expired so sent off for a new one only to have the application returned to him as there was something wrong with the photos he'd supplied. He got new photos and re-sent the application. We knew that we were cutting it fine as there was only about 10 days to go to our holiday so paid extra to have the passport couriered back to him.

We were assured that it would arrive before 8am on the morning of our flight which was at 10.45am from an airport at least an hour's drive away.

8.15 it arrived, we jumped in the car and promptly hit the morning rush hour. To cut an agonisingly long journey short, we arrived at the airport with about 40 minutes to spare before our flight. We had to wait about 10 minutes for the shuttle bus from the car park so by the time we reached the departure lounge we really felt that we'd battled against all the odds to get there, in time.

Congratulating ourselves, we took off our belts and shoes to walk through the beep-beep machine, put everything out of our pockets into the tray on the conveyor belt, along with our hand luggage, to go through the x-ray machine. We could see our plane through the window.

"Excuse me sir, is this yours?" a uniformed gent asked misterballoons. "Could you please step this way".

We'd packed our hand luggage carefully knowing that we couldn't take any sharp objects, lighters, liquids, etc through. What could they be objecting to?

Only the fucking five spent machine gun bullets on mister's keyring! (We didn't think of those did we?) He'd picked them up years ago from a box of tat in a second-hand shop and they'd since lived quite happily next to his keys.

Cue mister being taken to a sectioned off area and questioned by customs officials and two armed (!?) coppers. In the light off all the recent terrorist activity they were taking it very seriously and needed to check the history of the bullets, had they been used in any reported crime, etc.

We still had a chance of catching the flight so mister tried to keep the interview as brief as possible. Bless him; when asked what possessed him to try and take bullets onto the flight he answered "Because I'm a twat". They believed him and let him board.

And Prague was fucking great.
(rubberballoons, Fri 21 Sep 2007, 16:23, Reply)