Drinking can often get pretty out of hand at Christmas because you generally see people you haven’t seen all year and one thing leads to another.

However bad your Christmas drinking session is though, I don’t think it’s going to have anything on 48 year old Shawn Smith’s. He went for a few pints with his mates down at his local, and when one of them remarked that it was cheaper to buy tobacco on the continent rather than in England, a bunch of them headed over to France to stock up. To make it even dumber, they were from Worcester so not even that close to the Channel.

Unfortunately for Shawn he didn’t have a passport – but that didn’t stop him getting in France though as nobody checked his documents on the way over there. Having successfully stocked up on a year’s supply of rolling tobacco, the gang were heading back to the UK where Shawn got questioned about his lack of a passport and refused entry back into the country. He was told he would have to travel 180 miles to the British consulate in Paris to apply for a passport in order to get back. Talk about a stinker of a hangover.

His friends all ditched him and he made the trip on his own. Even more unfortunately for him, Shawn couldn’t get a passport immediately and had to wait a week in Paris for it as he was born in Germany so had to have his nationality checked. Previously before this he had never even left the UK or owned a passport so it was going to take a while to get it sorted out.

In the meantime while he waited in Paris, he stayed in a £17 a night hotel and ate only breakfast croissants and McDonald’s in order to keep the costs of the trip down. Shawn also had to pay another £100 for the passport and his train fares to and from Paris and then back to Worcester. He’s now warning people not to leave the country without their passport, because apparently he still believes that there are people in the country who think that that is a good idea and don’t realise that it’s a necessary document to travel pretty much everywhere:

 I must have fallen asleep when we got to the port because the next thing I knew I woke up and was in France and we were on the way to Belgium.

I was shocked when they told me I had to go to Paris to fill out the forms for an emergency passport but I had no choice.

I don’t want to see Paris again, although it is a beautiful city.

I only went abroad to save cash on tobacco but it ended up costing me a fortune. It was an expensive hangover but something to tell the grandkids about.

Yeah great story there bro.