My brother League (as in pub league the opposite of a professional league) lives in Lagos, Nigeria but is currently in London staying at the Rabbi's house. The Rabbi is back from holiday and doing his best to be patient with his new unannounced house guest, who has not divulged his leaving date.
League has been in particularly special form, terrorizing the commuters on the overland trains as he skates up and down with his tennis bag over his shoulder and a beer can in his hand. The tennis bag doesn't have a tennis racket in it, it contains the main contents of his life: passport, phone (he is on his 17th of the year), key Nigerian documents, a pair of keys for the Rabbi's house held together with a plaster, a bank card that does not work at UK ATMs.
Within a few minutes League had run over a Bengalese women's foot. She yelped, her husband got very upset, other members of the carriage joined in, League was loving the attention and doing his best to wind up the husband with his best Bengalese pigeon accent. A black ex-convict with no t-shirt and acid holes all over his body came to our defense (on the left in the photo). League and the acid holed main realised they had a lot in common, including a love of beer. The holed acid man had a bag of goodies with him. We got off at the next stop with our new friend.
We had gone to Stratford to meet my friend who is a Burlesque dancer. League's UK girlfriend traveled an hour and a half to meet us in Stratford, but League had run out of phone battery, so did the charitable thing - a quick loop of Stratford International to try and find her, didn't, and came back to join us for another beer. We were still there at 8 pm drinking when League remembered he had a 10h30pm return flight to Lagos to catch in a few hours.
Another spanner, League had no Nigerian visa, during the past few weeks he hadn't found the time to visit the embassy. You can purchase one on arrival but for this, you need cash and League has a special Nigerian card that only works in special places, none of the special places in London were open at 8 pm. So he asked Burlesque if she could edit his expired visa. Burlesque got to work, forged the documents and we fled from Stratford in an Uber via Hampstead to Heathrow.
Arriving 45 minutes before his international flight, League managed to get the airline to accept him on board. Passport control though pointed out he didn't have any spare pages in his passport. League went bonkers and was escorted back to departures.
He slept the night on a terminal 4 bench, he tried again the next day, it still didn't work. He had left his phone in my handbag and had broken is laptop charger so had no way of communicating with the outside world. Two days later he arrived back at the Rabbi's house.
Recapping, League tried to board an international flight with:
45 minutes to go before the departure
No up to date visa
No phone
No working laptop
No cash or ability to draw out cash
No passport-free pages.
And somewhere between Heathrow and Hampstead, he lost his special Nigerian bank card.
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