As I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams I found my passport photo transformed into a gigantic blur. Some damn fool had spilt a glass of water over it during the night: almost certainly me. I do not ordinarily resemble the protagonist from Mel Gibson’s The Man Without a Face, and with a flight back from Spain in the evening, this development was worrying. Once what was euphemistically termed the ‘Bolshoi solution’ was discarded - the only acid left in the villa by this point taking the form of a lemon wedge - I was left with little option but to try and bluff my way through.
I did briefly consider a trip to the British consulate, but given that we were in Alicanté - essentially Blackpool en mar - it wasn’t that tantalising a prospect. The overworked FCO young guns who’d dreamt of Baghdad and had been posted to Benidorm probably had enough to be getting on with ministering to Darren from Basildon, the cock and balls sunburnt into his forehead contravening Monarch Airlines’ passenger charter and so precluding him from flying. Anyway, there wasn’t time.
Reassurances, running the gamut from outright, bilious sarcasm to dreamy platitudes, were no good to me, as the one member of our party who’d been barred from a flight due to a mutilated passport wouldn’t say anything at all. There was nothing to do but numb the worries with under-spiced paella and over-iced beers until the airport beckoned.
Without proper documentation an airport ceases to be a source of boredom or excitement and morphs into a highly productive, expertly managed paranoia factory. Everything was suddenly absolutely terrifying. Cheerful Valencian security personnel, who on a day when I possessed bona fide documentation would have reminded me of plump, cherubic Arsenal playmaker Santi Cazorla, took on the appearance of the Turkish prison staff in Midnight Express. They knew what I was about. I was a man pretending to have a face. Lacking the native command of Spanish to summarise the plot of Dorian Gray, I was lost.
Having cleared the first security hurdle thanks to sheer blind luck, the pressure built as two hundred of Essex’s best and I queued to board the Ryanair flight to Stansted. There was to be no neglecting to check the passport this time. Sweat was pouring down my homely southern brow and my sunburnt temples were glowing like
ruby red like the finest Sevillan jamón ibérico - I’ve looked better. I reached the front. The Spanish inquisition began - it turns out one can predict it. ‘Passport?’ demanded the stern slab of Spanish olive tree in front of me. I mumbled pathetically, something about growing into my looks, and dangled the accursed document with all the élan of a sixteen year-old flashing his knock-off European Driving Permit in Spar. Reader, I fooled him. I was through, and, conscious all the while of a last ditch subterfuge à la The Great Escape, I reverently boarded O’Leary’s yellow and blue temple to airline deregulation.
‘Tougher checks mean longer queues’ bellowed the UK Border Agency’s posters upon arrival in Stansted. The deal wasn’t quite done yet. By now adept at hoodwinking addled-minded border staff though, I proceeded serenely through the Border and customs in a scene reminiscent of Catch Me If You Can, although instead of a leggy PanAm stewardess on each arm I was accompanied only by sunburnt men in England shirts.
Ronnie Biggs’s stated reason for leaving exile in Brazil and returning to the UK to face his prison sentence was his desire to ‘walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint of bitter.’ After my similar period on the lam I settled for an airport Costa Coffee and a macchiato, but the parallels are self-evident. I had stolen myself home from the continent. The Great Spain Robbery was complete.
Postscript:
In an apparently unrelated announcement three days later, Home Secretary Theresa May told the Commons that she was scrapping the UK Border Agency.
UKIP’s election manifesto contains a plank stating that, ‘As a member of the EU, Britain has lost control of her borders.’
A replacement passport costs £72.50.
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