Plus Ce Change

So recently I renewed my passport, thus avoiding being incorporated into NuLabor's stasi database 'til long after it has collapsed under its own weight and crushing uselessness.

But UKIPS like to save money on their forms. It's probably small potatoes but if they put the price of passports on all their documentation then every time they increase the price of renewal (which will effectively be £93 or more by the time the windscreen scrapers start being issued) they have to ensure that all outstanding forms have been removed from circulation, and that they have been reprinted with the new prices on. To save all that hassle they place the cost of renewal on a single sheet of paper. I lost mine, but if memory served it was about an inch across and written in pencil on that old fashioned kind of toilet paper you used to get in pads.

As my mother will tell you, I had spent an age getting round to my passport renewal so when I finally got my fearful symmetry committed to photographic paper in the biometrics stylee, I was rather keen to just get on with it and get the thing in the post. But how much was it? Being unable to find the tiny bit of paper (come to think of it, I cut myself shaving not long before, and may have used it to quell the bloodflow) I had to take a best guess, and used a figure that I had hastily scrawled on the "where the money goes" handout. And not long after I bundled the whole thing in the post, I received a letter telling me they had received the application. Then a letter telling me that I had sent them too much money, and that I would receive a cheque for the outstanding amount in a few weeks' time. Then I got my old passport back with the corner cut off. Then I got my new passport. Then I got the cheque, for the princely sum of £1.30. I've not paid it in yet...

Also, I noted that on my new passport (biometric chip included) you cannot see the colour of my eyes. What is more, for all the lipservice paid to biometrics, one's eye colour isn't recorded on the passport.