The Island
By Liam Ireland
Chapter One
Abandon all hope all ye who enter here
I’ve been in one or two fixes in my time, all through no fault of my own, but nothing quite prepared me for life on the island.
I was just twenty-one years old and feeling adventurous. So I set off to explore the world. Talk about an innocent abroad.
I had just got back from hitch-hiking through France and Switzerland, where I came far too close to being shot in the back by a Swiss border guard by inadvertently illegally crossing the border.
It is no fun having an SG550 assault rifle poked in between your shoulder blades by a man trained to kill I can tell you.
Two hours later, after having all my belongings gone through and a Swiss finger un-sympathetically inserted up my anus poking around for drugs, I was out of there.
In the end, I was frog marched outside and ordered to re-cross the border back into France, have my passport checked and then re-enter Switzerland legally.
Amazingly this was all achieved by the simple expedient of crossing a white centreline down the middle of the road. There was more to come on that trip, but this is about the island.
