opinion
Ben Harvey: Chutney can’t come on this flight - tale of poor planning

“We can’t get anything as good as this in London. Can you bring some when you come over? I really need this. I can’t get enough of it.” If the Australian Federal Police had intercepted this message from our British friend Nadia, officers would have been convinced my partner Grace and I were being asked to smuggle drugs into the UK. The source of Nadia’s addiction wasn’t narcotics but a particular type of chutney, of all things, which came from Kalbarri, of all places. Britain does a good chutney and Nadia is something of a connoisseur, having availed herself of most varieties over the years (usually accompanied by several pounds of cheese) so it was high praise indeed. She had bought a jar while on holiday in Australia early last year and, knowing Grace and I were coming to London in November, asked for what a druggie would call a “re-up”. No problem, I thought. Except it was. It turns out that tracking down the provenance of a random jar of chutney sold almost two year ago at a random community market at a random town in the Mid-West is harder than you think. Fortunately for Nadia, I am a professional investigative reporter and so brought to bear 25 years of journalistic experience. After Googling a few permutations of “who was selling chutney in Kalbarri in January 2023” I found the vendor. Come on down Jo’s Cakes and Preserves. Jo told me (with what I thought was misplaced pride) that she was actually from Geraldton. “Do you sell it in Perth?” I asked. “Oh, no,” she replied with a chuckle. “We aren’t that big.” Nadia is a great friend but there was no way I was driving to Geraldton and back just so she could fill out her cheese plate, so I was prepared to let this one go through to the keeper. “My son is a truck driver and comes down to Perth quite regularly,” Jo suddenly proffered. “How about I give him some and you can collect in the city?” Perfect, I replied. “Great, he will be at the Kewdale truck stop late arvo on Wednesday the ninth of October. Make sure you bring cash.” Let’s just stop there for a moment and contemplate what the Australian Federal Police would have thought had they evesdropped on the last bit of that conversation. I had a function to go to on the night of “the drop” so had to break the news to Grace that she would have to drive to the Kewdale BP in order to hand over a wad of cash to a truckie she had never met in exchange for a brown paper bag filled with stuff. Relationships have ended over less. Worryingly, it turned out Grace was a natural drug courier because she made the exchange without incident. Fast-forward six weeks and we were at Perth Airport waiting to check in for our flight to London, weighed down by two of the three jars of chutney (we kept one to see what all the hype was about). Before I go on, a bit of context about the hours leading up to our arrival at the airport. It was a 10.45pm flight and I inexplicably insisted on taking our Irish red setter to the Floreat dog beach before we got ready to go to the airport. We were only going to be away nine days but that’s more than enough time for a red setter’s pea-sized brain to forget you ever existed, so I wanted to show him some love before we left. Clancy chose that evening to chase a seagull halfway to Hillarys marina, so I was late getting home. Then there was a huge traffic jam at the entrance to the airport because one of the two lanes was closed due to roadworks. So, things were a little frosty between Grace and I as we waited to get through security. I thought nothing of it when her hand luggage was diverted for a special search because this happens quite regularly. Her passport photo must look shifty. The security guy was taking quite a while going through her stuff and for a moment I thought he had mistaken the Nutribullet smoothie blender she always travels with for some kind of illicit sex aid. No such luck. He placed the offending items on the bench. The bloody chutney jars. “You can only take things on that are up to 100ml,” he said. “These are at least 250ml.” “We really need to get those to England,” I said. “Is there anything we can do?” The security bloke told us we would have to go back and check in the hand luggage. We glanced at the clock. It wasn’t going to happen. Grace resisted the urge to say “I told you that you shouldn’t have taken the bloody dog to the bloody beach” and I resisted the urge to ask “why did you pack the bloody chutney in the bloody hand luggage you know the rules for carry-on you spend half your bloody life on a bloody plane for work”. We stood at the X-ray machine, helpless. “Goddamn you Clancy,” I muttered under my breath, as the queue behind us continued to swell. “And Goddamn you Perth drivers for not knowing how to merge.” “What about if we put it in a smaller container,” Grace offered hopefully, as I mentally worked out whether I could load a toothpaste tube with chutney. “Doesn’t work that way,” the security guard said. “It’s got to go in the bin.” By this stage Grace was almost crying and I was sounding increasingly unhinged. “No, wait, there’s got to be another way,” I pleaded. “Just wait a moment mate, please. Seriously, please. Look we really need to take those jars with us. You have no idea what Grace went through to get them.” You don’t need to have watched five seasons of Border Force to know that by this stage we were acting exactly like two nervous drug couriers would act if the jig was about to be up. The security guard probably believed we had laced the chutney with narcotics. I couldn’t blame him if he did; why else would someone be so hysterical about $20 worth of relish? “At least eat some of it,” I half-heartedly joked as he walked the jars to the contraband bin. Turns out Grace isn’t as good a drug dealer as I thought. If she was, she would have found a way to get those two jars of chutney up her bum.

opinionBen Harvey: Chutney can’t come on this flight - tale of poor planning

opinion
Ben Harvey: Chutney can’t come on this flight - tale of poor planning