America's "Special Relationship" With Us - part one

It was early January this year. We were still reeling from the over-indulgence of the festivities. But things would be good. We were going to America! Land of the Free.

As we set off, trundling along in the tube towards Heathrow, it was on my mind that we may be in for a harrowing airport experience; it was, after all, the 3rd consecutive day that BA had grounded its flight to Washington DC in response to a “specific security threat” which somehow never materialised. That’s “intelligence” for you.
Our only glimmer of hope was that we were not flying BA.

Security at LHR was tight, as you would expect, well for all the brown people anyway. One guy stood and separated the line into 2 queues – one of which was being thoroughly searched, while the other just dawdled through to wait at the gate. Guess which line my husband and I found ourselves in? The guy brusquely ordering people about, was "unable to divulge" the criteria for his “selection”, though looking at the two lines it really didn’t take a genius to figure it out.

I’m not saying that they didn’t search any white people – there were one or two token white folk in our queue – but my point is that they searched EVERY single non-white. Now, I know of people who argue that this is necessary because all the terrorists found are non-white (oh and Muslim apparently). Hello??? If you only search brown people you’ll only find brown terrorists. Is this concept so difficult to understand?

So anyway, we were afforded no niceties, as the dour-faced squadron of foragers rummaged through our bags and made us take off our shoes. One zealous woman kept lifting up my shoes – one in each hand – as if there was a small but important discrepancy. Now my travelling shoes were very light, and adding ANY weight to one of them would have been obvious to even the most blatant ignoramus. Wouldn’t it? I'm sure it would, yes. Or would it?

I decided then what I would do. I weighed my shoes when I got home. What do you mean, I’m obsessive? The left one weighed 376g.. and the right.. 375g. Oh my god. There WAS a discrepancy. Well so it seemed, but after I hacked the shoes to pieces in order to find the tiny nuclear device that someone had obviously planted in my footwear, I was left thinking that maybe, perhaps, it was possible that my shoes were just made like that. Hmm, I really liked those shoes too.