It's the little things....

 ...that grind you down.

I applied for a new passport yesterday. This is supposed to be easier than it was because - ta-dah! you can now do it on-line. When the OH did it a while back you could even take the necessary photograph on your computer at the relevant moment of the form filling. What could be easier?

What indeed? I mentioned that I was planning to do the application to a group of friends on Facebook. Got a couple of horror stories back about the photo.It had taken one multiple attempts to get one that the  was acceptable. Another  had so many failed attempts they gave up and went to one of those booth things. Good grief I thought, can it really be that hard?

I am here to tell you it can be and it was. The form filling bit was fairly easy, but oh! the problems I had with the photograph. You can no longer sit back in your (neutral coloured) office chair and let your computer take this for you. Oh no. You have to take one and upload it. Then it gets checked to make sure it fulfills all the requirements. And then it grades your photograph for the chance of success of being accepted for your passport. 

What a palaver. We really only have one room with neutral coloured walls with sufficient natural light to take  a photo in the winter daytime. It was tricky to find a bit of the wall that I could stand against - we tried several, which all involved moving furniture. Then the machine kept spitting out our attempts; we went from poor to fair and finally to good. This involved retries with various combinations of open and closed blinds all around the room. Personally I cannot see very much  difference between the two that got rejected and the one that got accepted; they all make me look like an ageing, tired and miserable cow of a person but if they won't let you smile...

Anyway in the end it was done. Form completed, photo accepted, fee paid. And then it told me I couldn't get my new passport until I sent the old one back. So my question is; if I have to send them something through the post what is the point of an on-line application process? A friend said it's like the self service check outs in supermarkets; it saves them paying someone to look at the form and put in the data at the other end. 

Well, weather permitting the old one will be off to the post office this morning. And in due course my lovely maroon coloured EU passport will be replaced with a blue one ( which is actually black) and which of course was the sole reason we all went through the trauma that was Brexit. And means that I have heard dozens of people moaning in airports about how they have to join the very long queue marked 'other passports'. I'm often tempted to ask them if they voted for Brexit. Although I don't.