As many of you know, our family often has travelling disasters, leading to the term “being noramlyed”. This April-May there were inumerable chances for things to go wrong. Members of my immediate family, including myself, were travelling all over the place: Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, USA, UK, Australia…

And nothing catastrophic happened. Everyone arrived more or less intact, with their luggage, and no airlines decided to go on strike. The worst thing that happened was having my toothpaste confiscated because I hadn’t noticed it was 120 mls tube instead of 100 mls. 

Yet our travels were not without oddity. The first one – a very pleasant one – was that after booking our trip to Cambodia for me, husband, daughter, son-in-law, grandson and my sister – we heard from my holidaying nephew that he was going to be in Siem Reap the day we arrived! Talk about a serendipitous meeting. We had a lovely meal together.

 The other incident that was worthy of note played out as follows…
I’m not going to say which country or airport was involved.  My sister and I were about to go through immigration prior to boarding a plane when I handed her my passport and boarding pass to hold, prior to a visit to the WC. She handed them back to afterwards, and we joined the usual immigration queue. She went through a different lane to me. On the other side of the immigration booths, as we headed towards the gate, we discovered that she had gone through on my passport and I had gone through on hers…

She is 7 years older than me, 6 inches taller and much slimmer. There is a slight family resemblance, but people do not ever confuse us!

So there you are – an extra 20mls of toothpaste is much more important that using the correct passport… I trust you all now feel much more confident about airport security.