A long overdue explanation for my prolonged absence Part 1

I've been away for a year and a half. I didn't think it had been that long, felt longer really, a lifetime almost. Of course for the usual reasons of good taste and legality i can't fill you in on everything that occurred but I'll do my best to give you a brief overview.
Falmouth didn't work out, I'd have thought that if one was to be insolvent anywhere a sun kissed peninsula with plenty of fish in the sea and mussels on the beach would be just peachy but did you know Cornwall has a winter as well? I sure as hell didn't. Times got hard, and damp, and pretty soon after my last post here I found myself with just enough money to cover one more month at my gentleman's lodgings. Unfortunately, as you may remember, at the time i was naively placing my hopes in National Lottery scratchcards as an untapped get rich quick scheme. The reason they're untapped and no instructional guide for their successful use exists is because it's bloody impossible. I took the full ninety-seven quid left for my keep and walked all the way to Truro. (after a series of ridiculous misunderstandings I had become persona non grata in all the Falmouth newsagents.) That took the best part of three hours i can tell you.
Anyway I get there, walk into a Tesco's, dump all the small change at the cigarette kiosk and tell the lady to give me a tin of Irn Bru, twenty Mayfair, a packet of matches and turn the rest into £100,000 prize scratchcards. I spent the best part of half an hour standing in the pissing rain outside, which never bloody stops in Cornwall, seriously it's worse than flipping Ireland, scratching off all these cards and did I win anything? Yes, I won thirty-four bloody quid. Then I only won seven off that, one quid off that, and that was the lot gone.
I was shaken bad, my faith in scratchcards evaporated instantly. there I was, no money, twelve damp Mayfair's, half a tin of Irn Bru and a damp, seasonally inappropriate summer suit the only things I had left in the world. I had some socks and y-fronts on admittedly but the less said about those the better. I suppose I could have walked back to Falmouth but what was the point, there was nothing in the lodgings apart from a half read Kenny Daglish biography and an unusable library card. After all my misadventures I decided the time had finally come to swallow my pride and return to Belfast.
Having no money for a bus ticket I decided that my only option was to walk to Wales, steal a row boat, nip across the Irish Sea and once I was on Eire soil I could just dander up along the coast and crash at my Dad's until the money built up again. What could be more simple? As it turned out pretty much anything else but more of that tomorrow