So far I think Nitro wins for the one who payed the highest price for his stupidity.
Meh... what's 3 years...
I can re-apply in December next year. I'd hoped it would be sooner, but it has to be 5 years after the offense. I appealed against the decision, tried to explain etc... but they knocked it back and told me to re-apply. The only problem is that there's now a 4 years wait for new applicants... so my only real option is to get a work permit and find a job. I can work in the country now that my 'bound-over' period has expired... but i've been so busy in the past 6 months that i haven't had time to sort anything out.
I've also just bought a new apartment in the City Lofts building at Salford Quays in Manchester... i move in a week on Monday. It took forever to sell up in Yorkshire... and i had to drop the price by £20K, pay their stamp duty and agree to pay their mortgage for 6 months. It was a shitty deal, but the housing market is completely fucked at the moment and it'd been up for sale for eighteen months with next to zero interest.
I've been living in the Quays for about a year or so in a different building about a mile away from where i'm moving to. Apartments in the City Lofts building don't come up very often so i agreed to buy it 5 minutes after walking through the door on the first viewing. It's not ideally placed for work, but the BBC's Media City development is right accross the road and will be opening in the next 2 years. I could either get a job there or sell my apartment for significantly more than i'm paying for it. Either way, i can't lose out.
Anyway, i very nearly ended up in trouble again today while i was shopping in Leeds with my girlfriend. I was coming out of Harvey Nichols when i heard someone shouting in the street. There was a crowd gathering further up to my right, and i was going that way anyway... so i figured i'd check out what was going on. Now, in most UK cities you tend to get preachers spreading the word of God... just talking shit about how they can't understand why sodomy has been made legal etc...
Anyway, there was an overweight, white-haired, 60+ year old guy, chanting about how this country has gone down the shitter in the past 50 years... and a crowd which had gathered around him. Nobody was heckling him, they were all just taking it in and having a bit of a giggle. There was no aggression on show from anybody. I stood there for about 2 minutes taking this old guys harmless bullshit in, and then noticed 5 plain-clothes police officers making their way through the crowd... heading straight for this preacher. They weren't undercover cops, they were just an anti-shoplifting team who had obviously been asked to do something by one of the shop owners.
Anyway, they showed this guy their badges, took him to one side and asked him to move on. He wasn't having any of it. As far as he was concerned he could stand there all day and preach his little heart out. I'm not sure what the legal standpoint is but it certainly didn't ammount to public disturbance which it what they told him he could be arrested for. After a couple of minutes of arguing with him about his right to free speech they turned aggressive and forced him up against the window of a shop and handcuffed him. Then, out of nowhere appeared who i can only imagine was this guys son. He looked like he was in his mid thirties... had an old shirt on and a pair of old-fashioned grey trousers and the shiniest shoes i've ever seen. He was trying to find out what was going on and just wanted to know why the preacher was being arrested. But the cops didn;t want to know and were very aggressive towards him, telling him that if he didn't leave immediately he'd be arrested too. Before he could say anything one of the fat skinhead cops grabbed the guy by the throat from behind and forced him onto the ground, ...punched him in the head several times and turned him over onto his chest so that they could handcuff him. He wasn't struggling or even arguing at this point, it was all completely unnecessary.
I stood there looking at the faces in the crowd, wondering why nobody was doing anything. Thinking '
fuck it' i walked over to the police officer who looked like he was in charge and said
"Excuse me, my friend runs that store overe there..." pointing at Envy just accross the street
"...and everything... y'know, these heavy handed tactics you're utilizing to remove an old man from the street... for talking about God. It's all on camera. I think you'll be looking at a complaint from a bystander, and provided that those to guys..." motioning towards the preacher and his son
"...are still unhappy about their treatment when they're released from custody... a complaint of police brutality".
He just looked at me as though to say
'are you fucking kidding me?'. Now i probably could have just left it and they'd have let the two guys go, but instead i said - nodding towards his collegues
"Obviously the neo-Nazi look is in this season eh!?". I knew i'd fucked it right there and then. He advised me to move on, my girlfriend started pulling me away... and i left. I don't know what happened to the guys they arrested.
I fucking hate cops.