A slight delay in updating the blog as I had to fly up to Edinburgh for work and have been busy catching up ever since. It was a good opportunity to test out the advice from Knitting magazine that there are currently no restrictions on taking knitting needles on flights. I checked in with hand baggage only at Heathrow, firmly ignoring the sign that said no knitting needles, on the basis that it must be out of date. I felt slightly nervous queueing up to go through security, though. What if the advice was wrong and my knitting was confiscated... I wished that I'd taken the stitches off the needles for safe-keeping. But they were bamboo needles, surely not at all dangerous - after all I had an umbrella in my bag, what about all those spokes? My courage was tested when eventually I got to the conveyor belt and my yellow rucksack was taken to one side for a full check. (This has happened before, there must be something about that rucksack. When I came back from Shetland in January it was emptied at Aberdeen airport and I had to promise not to throw a pebble from St Ninian's Beach at the pilot.) "Is it the umbrella?", I asked, hoping to draw attention away from my knitting. The security guard, however, took absolutely no notice of either umbrella or knitting and, having assured him I had no gels or lotions outside my little plastic bag, I was through security and into the departure lounge. Free to knit on the plane - and I did! I'm working on a scarf from Donna Druchunas' book Arctic Lace at the moment, of which more later. Next challenge will be the international flight when we go down to the Antarctic next month - if I'm not allowed to knit on a fifteen hour flight there could be other kinds of security problems!
