The Day I Evacuated Liverpool Airport

Here is an email to my manager Ian Grant.

Hi Ian. You are never going to believe this, but today I inadvertently evacuated John Lennon airport in Liverpool. I arrived at Edinburgh airport to discover that my briefcase that holds my guitar effects pedals was missing. I was on my way to report this to service air when I heard the message ‘ Would Bruce Watson please contact Service air desk immediately’. I was a bit shaken by this so anyway I went to the desk where the nice lady behind the counter handed me a mobile phone. The voice on the other end said that he was A DCI with the airport police and that they had found my case and wanted to know urgently what was in it. The case was locked and they couldn’t open the combination lock. I said jokingly to him” you haven’t blown it up have you’ to which he replied ‘not yet but we are just about to’. I told him that the case contained guitar effects pedals a power supply and a battery operated guitar tuner which were all linked together with cables. I then gave him the combination code. He said to wait 5 minutes and then he would get back to me. True to his word he got back in touch and told me that the case and its contents were safe. The security people had noticed that my case was going round on the carousel long after everybody else’s had been picked up. They tried to open it but couldn’t so they had a customs guy put it through the X ray machine. The DCI’s exact words to me were that the guy who put the case through the X ray took one look at it and shit himself. They immediately evacuated the whole airport thinking it was a bomb in a case. All this trouble was caused because a baggage handler in Amsterdam put my case on the Liverpool flight instead of the Edinburgh one. Now they are sending my case back to Amsterdam tonight then flying it over to Edinburgh tomorrow.Apart from that I had a great weekend.

Cheers

Bruce