I don't know why I have this special relationship with Thessaloniki airport.

It seems that whenever I go there something happens. In 1995, I was sitting in the upstairs bar, waiting for a flight to take me to Budapest, watching planes take off and land, and having a cup of undrinkably expensive coffee. An announcement seeped through the Public Address System: "Could all the people in the airport please leave and gather outside." No explanation, so nobody paid the smallest bit of attention and carried on talking, drinking their coffee, saying long goodbyes to their lovers.
Then, the next order filtered through the air. "Would all people please leave the airport building, because we have been informed of a possible bomb."
Still, nobody moved an inch; business carried on as usual, as though a bomb announcement was an everyday occurrence.
A third directive was made. This time, the voice switched gear from its pleasant rumble and rasped and roared.
"Would everyone please leave the airport buildings at once while we search the place for a bomb!!!
I think people would have continued munching their cake, or talking about so and so's 'bits on the side' if a military man, green combat clothes and real submachine gun at his side, hadn't then appeared and waved us all down the stairs.
Incidentally, there wasn't a bomb.
While we are on the subject of airports, I am permitting myself a diversion forward to 1996. I was checking-in at Heathrow aiport, terminal 4. The staff at the desk suspiciously eyed my ticket and my passport photo that didn't look much like me.
"Why are you flying to Prague on a single ticket?" asked one. Her voice was all steel and smoke.
"I live there, as it happens," I replied.
I must have sounded sarcastic. They looked at my documents again, and then said:
"Prove it."
"Prove what?"
"That you live in Prague."
Hell, I thought. "You could ring the school where I work."
"Don't make me laugh! If I ring a number, anybody could answer it. It could be a friend of yours pretending to be the director of a school. No, I want real evidence."
I wondered whether living in Prague meant that you had a special scar in a special place; whether residing in that city meant that you had to have some kind of initiation ceremony, or secret handshake.
What could I do to prove that I lived in the place? I had my bus metro/pass written in plain Czech. That didn't prove I lived there, but it was a step in the right direction. I fumbled for this and passed it over.
They glared at my pass where, for once, my looks had not been savaged by flat face-on lighting, and my smile looked faintly authentic, unlike my passport. They eyeballed me until I remembered that I had that very rare thing, an International Teacher's Card.
I groped around inside my pocket and found the item. I passed it to them. Clearly written was the school I worked for, and the address in the city.
It was as if I had offered them tickets to the Prague opera and they were both Smetana fans.
"Oh!" They were genuinely surprised. "We're sorry to have bothered you." And with little smiles trying to cover the disappointment they felt, they waved me on.
I felt a burden lift off my shoulders, even though I was innocent. It was strange the way they made you think you were guilty of some indescribable crime, like K. in The Trial, I thought, as I made my way through to the next section. This was where they check your handbaggage. A man in a uniform was standing officiously at the end of the X-Ray conveyor belt. The officer's feet did not drum the floor. He lurked there like a panther. The handluggage passed through the X-Ray without a murmur, and I had just taken it off the belt, when he addressed me with enough menace to rattle your skeleton:
"SO, SIR, WHERE MIGHT YOU BE GOING?"
"To Prague." Inadvertently I put down my luggage on the floor.
'PRAGUE? BUT SURELY YOU ARE IN THE WRONG TERMINAL? THERE ARE NO DIRECT FLIGHTS FROM HERE, SIR."
"Uh... I'm flying KLM, via Amsterdam. I change in Amsterdam."
'AH! AMSTERDAM! AND WHAT MIGHT YOU BE DOING IN THAT CITY..... SIR?"
"I'll be making a transfer. I won't be going into the city itself."
There was a pause while he digested this information. "WHAT A PITY. IT IS A VERY PRETTY PLACE, I THINK YOU'LL AGREE, ...........SIR?"
"Yes, a lovely place."
He nodded ironically and I took this to mean that it was time for me to move on. I was so confused by this treatment, that I walked off without picking up my baggage. I remembered a few seconds later.
S..t! I thought, and I careered back to the handbaggage section. My bag had gone, but the security official was still there.
"YOU MAY FIND YOUR BAGGAGE OVER THERE, SIR." He gestured in the general direction. I followed the direction of his gesture, and started walking.
"THE SECURITY DESK" he threw these words in , and I nodded. Shortly I found the desk, where a turbaned man was jabbing his fingers in my bag.
"Excuse me, but that's my bag," I said.
"Oh, is it sir?" And he gave it back to me.
I was unbothered by any other security for the rest of the journey.
My final story concerns when I travelled back from Greece by coach. It was before the Yugoslavian wars, and I had been travelling around Greece during the summer until my passport expired. Not knowing exactly what to do with my expired passport, I rang the British Embassy. They told me, "don't renew it until you get back to England; we have an agreement with Greece, and so up to a couple of weeks leeway won't matter."
Only half believing the diplomats, I had embarked on the coach and had gone through Europe without any border official batting an eyelid when they saw the state of my documents. However, sitting next to me was a nice enough fellow from America, who talked a lot about his dope experiences. I would like to point out to readers that I have not smoked the scented weed since I was twenty-one, (you can guess my age now from looking at my bio), and I think I was twenty-three when this long and gruesome journey took place; nevertheless, it was a lot of fun listening to his tales - he was a good storyteller.
I think at some point he showed me some hash he had, but my interest in it was obviously only polite, and so we trundled on towards Zeebruge and thence to Dover.
At Zeebruge he had been on the coach and had got on board the ship; when we got to Dover, he was nowhere to be seen.
I arrived at immigration - passport section, and the security official was very annoyed about my expired document. When I explained to him what the British embassy had said, he was even more annoyed in a cold, professional way. So, as I walked through the customs itself, I was stopped, my baggage looked at, the dogs sniffed around, and I realised two things that had made me look suspicious. One was my passport, the other was this chance encounter with an American hippie. I don't know if there had been any snitches on the coach; but as the coach rattled on towards London, my travelling companion had disappeared.