These have been trying times for itinerant musicians. Anybody who had already built up a dislike for the way airport staff are entitled to treat their customers would have found the recent situation testing to the point of phobia. To be fair, my fellow-citizens showed remarkable good humour in those endless and often directionless queues at Heathrow (our plane to Chicago took off six hours after I first presented myself at the terminal the other day); the staff were less accommodating, buffeted by conflicting and sometimes unjustifiable instructions, obliged to be inflexible and inclined to be stony-faced.
The restrictions on hand-luggage didn’t inconvenience us as much as some, since singers’ instruments go into the cabin whether the authorities like it or not. For instrumentalists the restrictions were sometimes disastrous. I read with sympathy of the plight of a Russian orchestra which had to return home days late by train because the insurance on their instruments required the players to keep them in sight at all times.
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