Postcard from London: Checkpoint Security

Before the bomb scare, I¹d arrived frazzled from a delayed bus ride at the British Library, where guards are occasionally stationed to check bags.

³What have you got in here?² said a very tall man with a thickAfrican accent, as he raffled through my messenger bag.
"Um, sweaters, a laptop," I said, distractedly, confused.

"No bombs?" he asked.

Coming back through the checkpoint that afternoon, after the trains had bee=shut down by the bomb scare, I headed instinctively towards the same guard.He smiled as he picked through my bags. "Not carrying bombs this time," I said.

In Britain, a sense of irony is not an act of terror.