My girlfriend has no respect for rules. When we were in the Sistine Chapel she ignored all the signs and the warnings from guards and just took photos anyway. She got away with it by pulling a contrite face as if implying she hadn't realised the law was in force.
Today we were flying down to Newquay to attend the Du Maurier festival in Fowey. I had just too much stuff to fit in my backpack so had foolishly bought a tiny suitcase which I only discovered too late that I would have to pay £18 each way to transport it and it wouldn't even get a seat! My girlfriend's bags were all small enoughto take on as hand luggage and I asked her if she had any liquids or lotions she wanted me to put in my bag. But she said she was OK.
When we were queuing up to go through security and we were asked if we needed a little plastic bag to put any bottles of liquid in, she said she didn't need one.
I was surprised by this. Surely she had some toiletries. She admitted that she did, but she didn't want to have to unpack all her stuff to get it out, that the rule was stupid and that she'd taken stuff through in the past and never got stopped.
I was pretty surprised by this. I was pretty certain that security would pick up on her bag full of liquid and the one time I had unknowingly taken some face scrub through in a bag I had been pounced upon. Or at least made to throw it away.
But she thought it was ridiculous to not be able to take toiletries on a plane and was going to ignore the law. She has a good contrite face. Maybe they would let her off.
But I made enough of a fuss for her to go back and get a plastic bag, though they only let her have one, so as it turned out she left most of her stuff in her hand luggage.
As it turned out I was able to look smug and go some way to evenning the score because she was indeed called out of line and made to empty her bag, where enough cosmetics to stock a small branch of Boots were removed from her rucksack. Like in a comedy sketch. Would there be a pot plant and a hat stand if there too? Would we make out flight or would she be taken away to the cells?
As it turned out the nice man just ran over the bottles with a swab that he tested in a machine and then put most of the bottles back through the scanner. But she lost a large bottle of saline solution for her contact lenses. Which seemed odd as she had at least a litre of fluid in the little bottles. But we had no time to go back and buy smaller bottles to put the saline solution in (again it's ok as long as it's not all in one bottle-weird) so her hubris meant she ended up losing it all. And I was able to look quietly but happily smug.
It would be nice to live in a world where you don't have to obey the rules that are inconvenient or which you think are stupid. But I like my girlfriend all the more for the fact that this is the way she operates!
