On a sunny day in September 2016, the man sitting in the front seat of a red VW bus at a stoplight in London’s Tower Hamlets was trying to figure out why he had been pulled over for speeding.
“He’s got a badge and I’ve got my ID on the window,” the driver, who gave his name only as Richard, said.
“And he’s telling me, ‘You’re going to get arrested, you’re going have to get your badge and put it on the car, so I’ll put your badge on the door.'”
Richard had a British passport and his own wallet.
He told me that he was trying not to be too angry.
He’d been to the United Kingdom before, but it was a country that, he told me, was more or less the same as Ireland, with the main difference being that the British passport was required to be renewed every three years and his ID was stamped with a photograph of him.
The bus stopped in the area of Euston Station.
Richard’s friends had seen him at the bus stop a few days earlier, and he’d told them that he’d been driving up from the airport to take a shortcut to the UK, where he’d be able to visit family.
“I don’t really care where you come from,” he told them.
“You’re here because you’re British.
I’ve been here for a long time, and I’ll never leave.”
His friend had been a friend of Richard’s father’s and a friend since they were teenagers.
“If he had a car, he would have left,” Richard said.
He drove up to the bus station and sat down at the wheel.
When he turned the ignition, he heard the horn blaring.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Richard had been driving the bus in the vicinity of London’s central business district.
He had a new passport and was driving a yellow VW bus.
“This is London!” he yelled.
“It’s so far away, I can’t see the whole city.”
His friends started laughing, and Richard tried to calm them.
He explained that he had taken the shortcut because he had to go to the airport before he had time to get to Ireland.
Richard and his friends were soon in the middle of the London bus stop.
He said he’d driven up from Dublin to Dublin, then to London, then back to Dublin.
He was getting about 15 minutes of traffic ahead of him when a man behind him suddenly turned his headlights on.
Richard said he pulled over to the side of the road and started backing up, and that when he stopped, the driver started laughing at him.
“They told me he was laughing at me,” Richard told me.
“So I got out of the car and tried to get away from him.”
The driver of the yellow VW pulled up next to Richard, who told him that he and his friend were going to have to pay £100 to get back onto the bus.
Richard didn’t understand what was going on.
“How can you charge £100?” he said.
When Richard got on the bus, he found that the driver had been laughing at the young man, telling him to “get the f— out of here.”
“I just had to say, ‘I’m not going to pay that, you stupid f—ing scumbag,'” Richard told his friend.
“But the guy was just laughing.”
Richard was pulled over again, this time for speeding, and again he was told to “just get the f*** out of this f—in’ car.”
“The driver said, ‘Oh, you’ve got a British driver’s licence,’ and he put his driver’s license on the passenger side window,” Richard recalled.
“Then I just started backing away.”
The man behind Richard had pulled out his wallet.
“Now I was like, ‘Okay, you know I can afford this,’ but I just felt like he was making me pay for it,” Richard remembered.
“That’s what I thought was going to happen.
Then he put the driver’s badge on my door.”
The bus driver said that he could see Richard was holding his wallet, so he pulled out a wallet.
Richard told the driver to put his badge on it, but the driver did not.
“The f—” he yelled, and the driver put his badges on both of Richards.
“All of a sudden, he was pulling my badge off the door, so that’s when I knew something was wrong,” Richard explained.
“When he put it back on, I was just like, f—, I’m going to be arrested.”
“He just started laughing,” Richard continued.
“Just started laughing.”
The young man behind the driver also pulled out an identification card and a receipt for the bus ticket, which he then put in his wallet for Richard to take home.
Richard felt his life had