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“Excuse me, Sir”

Posted Friday, 13 August, 2010 by Pete Underhill

Coming back from a Bad Taste Bears signing in Vienna, I'd just gone through passport control at Birmingham airport and a gent, who turned out to be a West Midlands Police officer said "Excuse me sir. Could you tell me where you've travelled from?"

I tell him that I've just returned from a business trip traveling from Vienna via Zurich.

It's all very pleasant and polite and I'm thinking to myself "This is a different experience I wonder what's going on".

This nice guy with the Police ID hanging round his neck then asked what it was I did for a living, so I told him.

At this point he became more intrigued and asked if I had any examples of my work.

I didn't, but I said I could draw him a bear, which seemed to be a good option.

He then asked me if I was famous, to which I replied I was hardly a celebrity, just an illustrator with a few crazy, enthusiastic collectors of my work.

I guess at this point, some travelers, after sitting in an aeroplane for hours before queuing across the hall for passport control, would start to see this as a damned inconvenience and they'd get a bit tetchy, but I enjoy little adventures like this.

So I was taken into a small office at the side of the hall and the police officer found some A4 paper for me to do my thing.

He told me that if I did a drawing for him he'd auction it for the Help for Heroes charity.

Coincidentally, on my flight out, I'd spoken to a guy who was involved in the logistics of feeding the armed forces and was on his way to a stint in Afghanistan. He'd suggested, once we'd exchanged details of our individual functions, that making Bad Taste Bears depicting the lives of the soldiers in Afghanistan would be a great success.

So, with this in mind, I decided to draw for my Birmingham bobby, the old Irish mine detector joke of a bear with its fingers in its ears about to 'locate' a landmine by stamping on it.

As I scribbled, I learned that Paul's job (I never got his full name) is to select random travelers to answer a couple of questions. I feel flattered that out of the heaving hall full of glum arrivals, I was worth stopping.

We chatted as I drew and I lost track of how long I was in there, maybe twenty minutes, half an hour or so. Interestingly, once I completed the drawing and gave it to the officer, the hall at arrivals had totally cleared and the staff at the passport desks turned and watched us emerge from the interview room.

The officer, who's name was Paul, shook my hand and thanked me and I said I was glad to have helped but for the benefit of the staff watching, as I walked away I called, "It was a pleasure, but next time could you use a bit more KY?"

I like adventures, me.