So anyway, the airport stabbing incident.

I should point out before we go any further that if your definition of stabbing is limited to activities involving knives and bleeding, then sorry to disappoint, but I wasn’t actually stabbed. I’ve never actually been stabbed like that, thankfully.

Sure, there was that one time when my brother tried to fake me out, doing that thing when you lunge at someone’s upper arm knife-point first, only to fake and twist your wrist so that the knife ends up parallel to the arm instead of perpendicular to it, and you wind up thumping the victim square on the upper arm instead.

Doesn’t everyone’s family indulge in casual knife play? Oh, just mine, then? It’s quite safe, really…

Well that’s the theory, anyway. In practice, I flinched and the blade slammed into my arm at an angle. It didn’t puncture the skin, but I had a hell of a bruise afterwards. Thank goodness he used a blunt butterknife, I say.

I suppose that technically, that doesn’t count as being stabbed, but rather as being attacked with a knife.

And if we were going to count that sort of thing, we’d have to include the attack in Bolivia, the London mugging, and at a stretch, the time that the mad homeless guy went postal with a blade in Liverpool’s Bold Street, when three minutes before he’d been fumbling through North and South in the bargain basement at Dillons. I ran the department that particular festive season, and I felt like going postal pretty much every day in the stretch before Christmas, believe me (typical customer quote: “I’m looking for a book for my dad. Something with a car on the cover”) so I could certainly sympathise with Mad Billy to an extent.

But none of those experiences strictly counts as a stabbing, insomuch as they didn’t involve the penetrative interaction of a pointy, sharp thing with a soft fleshy thing, with a rather nasty, red side effect.

The nearest thing to that definition is what happened in Aberdeen Dyce airport, which is what I meant to tell you in the first place.

I’d been working in the youth hostel up there all summer, and due to various train strikes, rail timetable complexities and totally incomprehensible pricing policies on the part of the train operators, I opted to make the most of my student discount (oh, how I long for the days of Campus Travel and 1/3 off flights for students and those under 26. Come to that, oh how I long for being a person under 26. Or should that be a person under 26?) and fly home to Manchester for �60 in under an hour, rather than take three days of trains and overnights in various Northern locations at some staggering cost in the region of �100.

Two friends and colleagues from the hostel opted to accompany me out to the airport, which was nice of them, and they helped my carry my cases and hung around being jovial as I checked in.

Perhaps it was their rather near-the-bone comments about the possible contents of my suitcase, or perhaps it was the influence of my unkempt “student who has just been working in a youth hostel all summer” look, but in either case, the woman behind the check-in desk told me I’d need to have my check-in case X-rayed before she accepted it, as a “random routine security measure”.

She gestured me towards a screened-off area behind the check-in desk. I picked up my case and told the boys I’d be back out in a couple of minutes. They smiled and went to get a coffee, or, more likely, a pint.

Behind the screen was an X-ray machine, a table and three security guards - two male, one female - in dark green uniforms. I plonked my case on the conveyor belt and stood back as they watched the contents appear on the little monitor. The female security guard gestured to the others. They crowded around the monitor, pointing. After a while, they asked me to move my case onto the table.

One of the men asked me if there was anything electronic in the case. I said no. They asked again and again the same questions - What was in it? Anything electrical or electronic? Did I pack it myself? Leave it unattended? I answered everything carefully and accurately. Just clothes, toiletries and a couple of books. No. Yes. No.

They frowned, and asked me to open the case, because the x-ray machine was showing signs of wires inside.

Wires! There were certainly no wires, I told them. I got flustered and opened the case. Packed tightly as it was, the medium-sized suitcase burst open when the zip was released, pushing clothes and shoes upwards as it exhaled.

As instructed, I took every item out and laid them in lines on the table to be checked by the two men, who fondled through my undergarments in a bored fashion. At the heart of the case, we discovered a sock containing three necklaces and a couple of pairs of earrings. The fine chains of the necklaces, wound around each other, could have looked suspiciously like wiring. The security guards were satisfied and told me to repack everything.

I tried. When I’d packed the case earlier in the day, I’d recruited the help of Eilidh, another desk assistant, to push down on the soft lid while I ran the zip around the outside, but even then, I’d needed to use careful packing techniques and stealth rolling to get everything in. Throwing things into the case just wasn’t going to cut the mustard, and the lid remained stubbornly aloft.

The female security guard stepped in and asked if she could offer some assistance. “Sure,” I said, “You push down on the lid, and I’ll run the zip around.”

Well, that wasn’t going to work. She was too short to provide proper leverage and sufficient weight on the lid, and it didn’t even come close to shutting. She offered to swap, so that I’d push it closed while she tackled the zip.

The trouble was, that it was an old suitcase. The trouble was, that it zipped rather easier and faster than she was expecting. The trouble was, that she had grasped the zip at a strange angle. The trouble was, quite simply, that she was wearing talonous false nails. The trouble was, you see, that as the zip whizzed around the corner of the case it snapped off and with the force of surprise she rammed the jagged metal edge and her particularly sharp red thumbnail into the heel of my thumb, which started to spurt blood in an alarming fashion all over the suitcase, the guard, the table, and me.

She apologised profusely, and extracted the jagged metal tag and her broken nail from my bloody palm. Her colleagues ran for medical supplies, and bandaged me up. Then, slightly shaken and pale, I collected my blotched suitcase and went outside to meet the lads again, who boggled at the pale, bloody and bandaged girl before them, emerging after twenty minutes of randomness and gbh from a security guard with cheap nails.

I’ve never been so happy to take off.