TRAVELER'S ADVISORY TRAVELING OVERSEAS AND UNDER SCRUTINY.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

Despite the dire warnings of increased airport security, travel has now become easier. And, given the persistent thrum of possible danger, it's even become a smidgen more exhilarating.

Nothing like the ``Casablanca-esque'' romance of wartime to put an edge on even your most mundane vacation activities.

Security can be subject to peculiar twists. My wife was carrying a water bottle as we passed through the checkpoint at Los Angeles International on a recent trip to London, and the security guard actually asked her to take a drink from it. Apparently, they wanted to be sure she wasn't carrying liquid anthrax.

Since we had arrived wildly early as advised, we had more than the usual amounts of time to kill, so we stopped at a restaurant. The front of its menu contained a list of items that were no longer available - because they required, either in their preparation or consumption, a knife.

Some of these changes seemed oddly capricious: You could no longer order a mushroom burger, but you could still munch into a bacon cheeseburger.

Aboard the plane, our pilot made a speech in which he used his personal particulars in an attempt to lessen uneasiness. He was a few months from retirement, and with the comp time and sick days he had accrued, he could easily leave the airways right now, he told us, but there was nowhere he would rather be.

London's Heathrow Airport remains packed with travelers. The gauntlet we had to endure upon our return seemed destined to make more-timorous and less-patient vacationers question future travel plans.

My wife's backpack was repeatedly X-rayed and thoroughly searched, all to locate an oddly shaped pen that apparently appeared menacing in the X-ray machine.

Chat with Londoners, and you get the same sense of low-level anxiety that informs Angelenos' everyday lives: the impending expectation that because of the size and global significance of the city, something, somewhere, is bound to occur. Signs in many public buildings refer euphemistically to ``recent events.''

Tensions also had fleeting, odd effects on the arts. I took in a play in the West End, a revival of ``A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.'' In one scene, Christmas carolers visit the main couple, and the lead character says he'll get rid of them: ``I'll tell them we're Muslim.'' It might've been a fairly funny line when the play was first performed in the late '60s, but now it gets a huge laugh.

There's a large Muslim population in London, a fact the newspapers don't ignore. They carried stories on the issue of British Muslims returning to the Middle East to fight alongside the Taliban. One story told of a Muslim's return, only to be disillusioned to find nothing but chaos and confusion amid the ranks. Another debated whether Muslims who went to fight should be executed as traitors were they to return.

Meanwhile, the local papers, particularly the tabloids, were dividing their front pages between war news and hype for the upcoming ``Harry Potter'' movie, which had its premiere in London. (At the premiere, wind swept the smoky smell of the preshow fireworks into the theater's lobby, which produced a momentary explosion of security activity.) Some papers even played up Harry over the Taliban, relegating Afghanistan coverage to the bottom of the page.

There was a terrorist attack in England while I was in London: In Birmingham, the country's second-largest city, a car bomb injured a several policemen. Had it been detonated properly, hundreds could have been killed. The odd thing about this was the look of almost palpable relief newscasters had as they reported that this was the work of Irish, rather than Islamic extremists. The Irish, the subtext suggested, were far easier to contend with.

Still, normalcy - in the guise of old-fashioned normal rudeness - was still evident. In the lobby of my hotel, a Frenchman perceived a slight, and was going to let everyone within earshot know about it. (Memo to crackpots: Announcing you are friends with the hotel's owner is a lame ploy; if it were so, you clearly wouldn't go out of your way to make his hotel look bad.)

It was the only thing resembling an altercation I witnessed during my entire stay in London, and the fact that someone could be so pathologically myopic and self-centered during wartime was, in the most bizarre of ways, vaguely reassuring.