The travelling fork

As I am about to embark on a further flurry of travelling, I thought I should clarify the point about ‘have fork, will travel’. Clearly it is unwise at the moment to arm oneself with a fork on international air travel and this is tantamount to a request for a full body search and possible incarceration so the fork I actually always have with my is this entirely impractical but symbolic silver charm. It's not clear the size of my fork from this picture - but it's tiny, about the size of my thumb nail. This is always attached to something I’m wearing but unfortunately wouldn’t assist me if I wanted to taste something delectable on my travels. I just have to hope instead that my intended destination is suitably cutlery-ed up and I will be happy.

I recall reading that Nigella Lawson keeps a whisk in her handbag (I keep one in my drawer at work!) and I used to always travel with a little silver pepper mill in case the establishment I was visiting only offered a pot of ‘dust’ in the place of peppercorns and a suitable grinding device. This used to travel with me on my weekly trips to Europe though did cause many a security guard untold excitement on discovery. I don’t travel so frequently now and the rules on what is acceptable have been considerably revised so it doesn’t seem worth the aggravation. If I do get to take that planned trip to Moscow I may put it in my hold bag as in my, albeit limited, experience with Russian food was in Helsinki and it was very salty. The pepper mill helped me counteract some of that, though actually all the food I had in Finland was generally too salty for my tastes so I could be casting unnecessary aspersions on Russian food.

If I am travelling somewhere where I would be called along to cook (not M or D’s as they both have a very fine collection of knives), I generally slip my favourite Global knife in to my bag also though generally only if it’s going in a plane hold. If I am going on a train, as I often do to Europe now, I am pretty uncertain whether it is acceptable to be tooled up and often leave it behind – just in case! I’d hate to be in a situation where my favourite knife got confiscated! Shudder!
Many years ago I bought a fabulous folding Laguiole knife (with the silver bee on the handle) in France, thinking that this would be handy if I needed a decent knife to prepare vegetables or other food. However I can’t have this about my person in the UK, so it remains safely at home. And frankly, I find folding knives very difficult to fold anyway – I always think I may sacrifice a finger in the process.
So a miniature fork it is then – so much safer even if it serves no earthly purpose!