Passport to frustration (From The Northern Echo)

Passport to frustration

10:42am Thursday 12th November 2009 in

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YES. We did it. We managed to escape from the country for half-term week. As a family with five children that is not as easy as it sounds.

For some reason, the Government seems to be doing its damnedest to keep us all in.

We had to shell out hundreds of pounds just to be allowed to leave – and that was before we had even paid for flights and accommodation. Because nowadays, each of us has to have a passport and when we go abroad, the chances are at least a few of them have run out.

Four had expired this time, as well as all our European health insurance cards. So that meant many hours of queuing up in bleak, grey Post Office buildings trying to communicate with intransigent officials, whose main role seems to be to try and make life as difficult as possible for us, through thick glass panels.

When our first two were born, the children’s names were simply added to ours. But that was obviously far too straightforward.

So, in 1998, someone had the brilliant idea that even babies should carry separate passports, renewable every five years, forcing parents to go through the expensive and time-consuming farce of form-filling and having youngsters photographed.

To make it more difficult, they introduced even more stringent rules and regulations designed to make it virtually impossible to produce an approved photograph of your fidgety offspring in less than 20 sittings.

“Don’t blink. Don’t smile. No, don’t laugh. I mean it. No expression on your face whatsoever. Make sure your hair’s not in your eyes, I barked at all the boys through the little curtain in the photo booth. One of them pressed the black and white button by mistake. In another, one of the boys’ eyes were half shut. We had a few more goes.

Then we had to ask a teacher friend if she wouldn’t mind filling in sections in all four forms to confirm she knew and recognised the boys, before adding all her own passport and personal details and signing and authorising all the photographs.

“You weren’t planning on doing anything this weekend?” I asked her.

When I got them back to the Post Office, one photograph was rejected because our ten-year-old’s eyes were a fraction off a millimetre off a little dotted line on a transparent sheet the man behind the counter placed over the photograph.

“The eyes have to be exactly on that line,” he explained. I asked where I could get one of those transparent sheets, so I could make sure the next photograph was okay. “You can’t,” he said, with what I am sure was a smug grin. “Only we have them.”

Then the teacher’s signature was queried because she had put a dot – just a little, sort of half-hearted full stop – after her name on one form.

The dot was just on the very inside edge, of the border of the box outside which you are not supposed to write.

I wondered if he was joking. But he shook his head. What more could he want? A pint of blood? A kidney? We only want to go away for a week’s holiday, I told him.

Finally, when I had jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops, he presented me with the bill. Because the older two boys are aged 16 and over, they pay the new, increased adult rates of £77.50. The younger boys’ cost £49 each. And then there was the £7 each additional fee for checking and postage.

That makes a total of £281 for four passports – a hefty price for a few flimsy travel documents of 30 odd pages, with all but six of them blank.

How many volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica could I buy for that?

And then, to top it all, they threw in a postal strike, keeping us on the edge of our seats over whether they would arrive in time or not.

It’s enough to make you want to leave the country...

AS a parent constantly grappling over the rules of apostrophes with my children, is it too much to hope that the name change at Newcastle’s St James’ Park might just be the perfect opportunity to sort out the punctuation?

Since there aren’t many saints called Jame, even my seven-year-old thinks it should be St James’s Park.

WE live in a selective education area, which means children at our primary school take the 11-Plus. This can put a lot of pressure on parents and youngsters alike. At times, anxiety levels are particularly high. Seven-year-old Albert was talking about it all in the car on the way home one day last week, after a conversation about it at the school gates: “You know, Mum. It doesn’t really matter if you pass or fail because, do you know, even if you fail you still get to go to a school.” That summed it up in a nutshell. Sometimes young children can be so profound.