Airports are the most messed-up places I know. I’ve just queued for 20 minutes for the honour of taking half my clothes off, swabbed for explosives and then electronically stripped naked (seriously) by a millimetre-wave scanner monitored two minimum-wage numbnuts still giggling over the best pair of x-rayed tits they’ve seen today. Or mocking my cock. 
Anything remotely different here is treated with contempt by the rent-a-nazi thugs who don uniforms and become cookie-cut arseholes on a mission, ostensibly to uphold the rules but typically just seeing who they can piss off in the course of their day. Signs everywhere threaten dissent with horrible punishment: verbal abuse is treated with the same seriousness as hitting someone; the only difference being that verbal abuse is open to interpretation whereas a right hook is less so. I’m scared to even ask if I have a choice in being visually assessed by a big microwave oven.
My boots, always my boots, are checked to see if they’re the exploding kind. I have to take off my belt and one-handedly waddle the rest of the way with trousers threatening to fall to my ankles because my belt buckle might be a lethal weapon. The woman in front of me had her tiny bottle of water confiscated because, in the universe these people inhabit, water is a controlled substance and could very well lead to a plane blowing up in mid-air. The indignity of it all was compounded by a rare, polite security guard who even referred to it as a bottle of water. He knew. She knew. I knew: it was a bottle of water. Not explodey.
Airports are pretty messed-up, it’s true. Right now, two armed men holding Heckler and Koch submachine guns across their chests are stood in the Clarins concession of the cosmetics shop opposite me chatting up the pretty sales girls. They’re impressing her with their manly swagger and giant weapons. They’re also reducing shoplifting by 100%, I assure you. No one would dare. You just don’t see this kinda thing in the normal world. Reality is suspended in an airport.
Not that that’s always going to be the way. Wait for the first nu-terror attack on a shopping mall and we’ll all be being cavity searched before we can get into Top Man. There’ll be armed cops posted outside HMV and Thorntons. Chocolate and CD sales will appear to go through the roof.
Something else prescient to me right now: Heeleys should be banned in airports. Those bastards are the real terrorists. Children should walk, not glide. It’s just WEIRD.
I’m idly wondering if there’s a substance that can be deployed on floors that can render Heeleys lethally and suddenly immobile such that child running along the thoroughfare to embark on a heeley-glide can be made to fall flat on their smug faces the moment they try to slide. If we can look at people’s genitals through their clothes, you’d think we could find a way.
Oh, they called my gate. Anyone know where to get lead codpieces?
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