“Dude, we gotta go. It’s not safe here.” A guide had come back to find me in a bar underneath a coach station in Bratislava. I’d started the evening on a Halloween pub crawl, but somewhere along the way I’d stopped doing the crawl part and stayed behind drinking shots of something vaguely like gin with a group of Slovak men. They spoke no English, I spoke no Slovak, and neither side seemed particularly bothered by this arrangement. I was enjoying myself enough that I hadn't e

I'd made it all the way to London before realising my passport was still back in the Midlands. There are mistakes you can solve with money and mistakes you can't. Fortunately, this was the first kind, although my credit card probably wished otherwise. I'd just got off the train at Paddington. I got straight back on one heading in the opposite direction, collected my passport and started doing the maths. There was no chance I was getting back across London and out to Stansted