tim's experiment

Time has alas caught up with my last passport. This is a sad moment because it means saying farewell to an interesting collection of chops and visas, some of which I am unlikely to collect again. The replacement process is reasonably painless. One goes to the British Consulate, an improvement on the arrangement in Lancaster, where the passport people shared premises with the unemployment benefit office, an arrangement which used to lead to interesting misunderstandings. The wait is not excessive, the charge is reasonable, the staff are friendly.

I remain resentful that the handsome dark blue hardback which used to stand out in a pile of passports on any group tour has now been replaced by a soft little red thing, with European Union on the front. Some further changes have been made since my old passport was issued. The pages of translation, which tell Immiugration officers in 22 languages the meanings of such vital terms as “name” and “sex”, have been moved to the back of the book, next to the page where such matters as my name and sex (the demure use of “gender” for this purpose has apparently not yet reached the Foreign Office)  are actually recorded. The inside front page, which used to say only “European Union”. “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” and “Passport”, but said them in 12 languages, has now been tidied up.

The same phrases are provided, but now only in three languages. One of them, mercifully, is still English. I am not sure about the other two. The language which renders European Union as “Yr Undeb Ewropeaidd” might I suppose be Welsh. Actually providing this translation seems a bit unnecessary, certainly as far as the word “Passport” is concerned. The Welsh word for Passport is Pasbort. I would have thought Welsh speakers could have worked out what Passport was. Perhaps they’re thick. The other language has a passing resemblance to some of the technical terms used in Scottish bagpiping, so I suppose it might be Gaelic. Why Her Britannic Majesty’s Sec of State for Foreign Affairs bothers with these lingistic adornments is beyond me. Most of the few people who speak Welsh or Gaelic are perfectly capable of reading English. If the Foreign Office wants to help British citizens who can’t handle the language they would probably help more people if the extra language suppoied was Urdu.

The other thing which has changed is the instructions which come with your new travel document. These now tell you that your passport contains a sensitive electronic chip and should be treated like a mobile phone. It must not be bent, twisted, dunked, heated, steamed, microwaved or put near a television set. It should not be allowed to sunbathe. I have never heard of anyone microwaving their passport but I suppose after the famous case of the woman who tried to dry her cat in a microwave oven we are taking no chances. The irony in this is, of course, that if you were designing a passport from scratch and you knew it was going to contain a fragile chip, you would not produce the pathetic floppy thing which we are now offered. You would go for something solid like the traditional blue hardback which was abolished as unEuropean. While one bureacrat was moving to snappy paperback passports, another one was planning to insert therein a sensitive chip which should not be bent or twisted.

This is the sort of thing which often happens in large organisations. Indeed it happens in Hong Kong. I notice that the MTR Corp is still planning its network so that everyone will have easy access to Hung Hom, where the old mainline station will be devoted entirely to trains to China. Meanwhile, at enormous expense, a new station for trains to China is being constructed on the other side of Kowloon. Needless to say it is too late to change any of this…