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| Goodbye old friend, gateway to France |
UK passports last ten years so you have time to forget the palaver of renewal. But here’s a happy story based on technological development.
I wasn’t looking forward to renewal. One reason was pure sentiment and normally I detest sentimentality. It meant junking my little red booklet representative of belonging to the EU. Replacing it with the UK’s flag-waving blue number and thus being forced – symbolically – into joining the Brexit voters. Who are now strangely silent about the “benefits” Brexit is bringing us.
Even worse is the very real palaver of organising a photo acceptable to the passport authorities. You sit on the stool in the supermarket cubicle, twiddle it up and down, yet still cut off your hairline (Forbidden). Get your hairline right and find you smiled (Forbidden). Contrive to look serious but your chin’s too low (Forbidden). An adult woman I know became so disturbed by all this she rang her father to help her. I sympathised.
This time a digital photo is required and so to hell with twiddling the stool. I spent £12 at a specialist. If I hadn’t chatted a perfect photograph would have been mine – approved and paid for – in three minutes. A lad with a Canon said “Lips together.”, “Chin up.”, etc, and that took 20 seconds. He fiddled with the Canon at the counter for a minute, handed me a colour proof (I looked dully insane.) with an eight-figure code. I swiped my credit card and was gone.
Online at home I followed a simple procedure, entered the code and was gratified to see my face appear on the filled-in application. The time-consuming bit was putting my old passport into an envelope and posting it to the authorities.
I was mildly exhilarated. I rarely yearn for Old Times.
It's too bad you have to turn in the old passport, but I can imagine why they want it. I have never had a passport, isn't that funny?
ReplyDeleteI've never had a passport. I'll probably never have one. But I think I would look "dully insane" on mine as well. (NewRobin13)
ReplyDeleteColette/NewRobin13: It is said that only a tiny percentage of US residents have a passport. This may explain why the annual US baseball championship is known as The World Series given that so far only a US team (occasionally playing a team from the same town) has won it.
DeleteDespite this many US citizens told me - hand on heart - that the US was the best country in the world to live in. Blind faith I suppose.
A few years ago I did a post listing the countries I'd visited. About forty as I recall. All very humble, as you might suppose, knowing they were inferior.
Your information is slightly out of date. The Toronto Blue Jays were World Series Champions twice in the 1990s. As for the USA being the best country in the world to live in, that has always been a myth, and continues to be be a myth, and the good citizens there may soon get to enjoy dictatorship along with their daily mass shootings.
DeleteDMG: Hey, let's not start a revolution. The US's status as a some kind of Nirvana in the world is not the issue. The point I was making is how can people who lack passports legitimately make that claim?
DeleteWe don’t need to surrender our old passports. The corners are cut and it is returned to you as a souvenir with all its visas, country stamps etc. Actually more and more this is done electronically so the keepsake aspect is minimized. As for the picture, the one on my current passport actually doesn’t look bad.
ReplyDeleteDMG: Not that it matters, but I believe my old passport will be returned to me. This must have happened many times and yet all have mysteriously disappeared. A passport seems a poor sort of souvenir; if it reminded me of anything it would be of impatient time spent waiting in douane queues.
ReplyDeleteI read somewhere that the reason for having the "slack jaw" non-smiling rule for passport photos is so that your body can be more easily identified if you die in a foreign country.
ReplyDeleteWhich depends, I imagine, on how you died!
I meant to add that my current passport photo looks pretty good. Probably because I got it straight after a visit to the hairdresser instead of in a rush on the way home from work in a howling gale!
DeleteJean: Surgical tinkering on my mouth in July 2021 resulted in a downward tilt at the left-hand end. I look as though I'm about to spit out an unwisely bitten chunk of lemon. On a previous biopsy to my face I did have the good sense to ask: (a) Will it leave an interesting scar? (2) If so will it add character to my face? The surgeon said nothing, being otherwise engaged, and it occurred to me I should have added a third question: Is there any character there worth enhancing?
ReplyDeleteI am toying with publishing the proof copy of this latest photograph. The lighting was particularly harsh, emphasising the bags under my eyes to the extent of each accommodating a bowling ball.
I’m ready for a look.
ReplyDeleteThat's funny. Somethings are better with computers than before. Standing line, someone barking orders, pretty much like going to the Department of Motor Vehicles here, simply an 'ugh' experience and best eliminated any way possible. SWM
ReplyDeleteSandi: Ah, yes. What we call "the queues" and you call "lines". People standing with bunches of paper in their hands, impatient but also hopeless. All that handwritten stuff turned into more handwritten stuff. The time it took. And sometimes the office in question closed for lunch at exactly the only time when most working stiffs were able to get away from work and do whatever had to be done.
ReplyDeleteBanks especially. Before ATMs were invented, before cheque-guarantee cards were even dreamed of. You could pay by cheque, of course, but only up to quite small amounts and even then the transaction was conducted in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion.
All those same banks checking signatures of cheques against the signature you provided years ago when you first opened an account. My signature used to differ from hour to hour.
Yet still people speak longingly of Golden Eras. When what such eras really consisted of was huge wastes of time. Which didn't really matter because people were paid in peanuts then. Labour was cheap.