Losing My Passport and a Trip to Consular Services

I had checked in online with KLM. Packed my stuff and gathered together my documents.

Passport.

Passport?

Passport!

After looking everywhere, nope. Gone.

My friend stopped me from panicking.

I had to apply online for an emergency passport. https://www.gov.uk/emergency-travel-document

The application process is straightforward, you don't need any details about your lost passport, and pick up the passport yourself from the Embassy. (Courier takes an age.) It took a couple of attempts to get an acceptable photograph, but the computer seemed to be happy to wait.

There's an irreversible point where you push a button to continue and the cancel your lost passport. Take one last look around before doing that.

It costs £100. What choice do you have?

The application was done by 11:00 or so on the Monday, and I was told I should hear within two days.

About 15:00 on the Tuesday, I got a mail telling me the passport was ready for collection, between 10:00 and 13:00 Monday-Friday, from the Consular Services office at the Embassy.

Wednesday morning, we set off to The Hague from Utrecht Central at about 08:30 on a train that was only a third-full. Navigating between the station and the Lange Voorhout by map turned out to be more confusing that we thought, and a kind lady on a bicycle put us in the right direction. We had overshot the left turn we needed by some distance.

The Lange Voorhout is where a lot of the Embassies are, and it's less than a hundred yards from the Dutch Parliament. All very tree-shaded and historical. Consular Services is on a side street. We got there about 09:45.

I was expecting a line, if not around the block, then at least up the Kliener Kazernestsraat. Even by 10:00 we were the only people there. Clearly, losing one's passport is not a thing that happens a lot.

Just before 10:00, a jovial man appeared, wished us a good morning and asked if we were for the Consular Services. I said I was, and he let us in, asked my name and vanished into the offices.

About five minutes later, a woman called my name from behind a customer window, and talked me through the emergency passport.



Yep. It's bright blue. Nobody on passport control anywhere is going to miss it.

The page you show passport control looks like a normal passport. The document number will be accepted by online check-in systems, and it is good for one journey to the UK by "any available route", and expires months into the future. The rules say there's a limit of five intermediate countries, and you should check if they accept UK emergency passports, but that may only be an issue outside Europe. It took no more than five minutes: no interview, no interrogation, no sermons.

Travelling the next day, the Dutch passport control (on leaving the country?) asked if I had lost it in the Netherlands.

When I arrived in the UK, the Passport Control officer took the passport from me, and asked where I had lost it and how much it cost. I wondered if the latter was a test question, but I think he didn't know. He gave me a you-won't-be-doing-that-again smile and waved me through.

I was impressed by the whole process.

The only bit that wasn't easy to take was waiting for the e-mail. That really is being in limbo.

How did it happen? It had been three years since I had travelled anywhere, and I had just lost the habits of travel, including putting the passport in the case (or room safe if you're in a hotel). So I'm going to look for a neck wallet to carry it next time.

Woke, Luxury Beliefs and Misdirection

In the Bad Old Days, you had to actively Screw Up.

Most people were inculcated with the habits of behaviour needed to make a Reasonable Life.

That started to change in the 1970's.

(Many) teachers, gurus, magazine editors, how-to-live authors, and politicians, stopped inculcating those old-skool habits.

So did some parents (the Bad Ones).

In TheCurrentYear, unless you take active steps to avoid it, you are going to Screw Up.

From seventeen-year old parents to forty-something cat lady career girls; from the mid-twenties with £30,000+ of student debt for a Useless Degree^TM, through the forty-somethings who took a 35-year mortgage, to the sixty-somethings heading into retirement with significant consumer debt; from the twenty-something boys getting fat eating junk food, to the forty-somethings whose knees are going from all those 10Ks and half-marathons...

There are so many ways to Screw Up now.

Especially when (many) teachers, academics, journalists, politicians, activists, mavens and other assorted opinionators are promulgating beliefs that, if followed, will almost certainly lead to a massive Screw Up in the life of anyone dumb enough to take them seriously?

What we do know is that a lot of the Fortunate Classes mouth parrot those beliefs.

Why? Because it is mis-direction.



There is pretty much one and only one way to live a prosperous, worthwhile, enjoyable life(*): work hard, exercise, and eat right; defer gratification; choose your partner for compatibility not romance, stay single if you can't find one, and if you can, get married, and have children (in that order); only buy things you need with money you have; drink moderately or not at all, and stay away from drugs; sleep at least seven hours a night, and wake up early (this will stop you going out late, which is when all the bad mistakes are made)...

The Fortunate Classes know this. It's how they live.  

Maybe once there was enough to go around, and the working class could be given a decent shot at getting some. But now, there is nowhere near enough to go around. Not since the 1% took so damn much of it. So anything your class can do to reduce the competition for you and your children...

So they lie to people about what it takes to have a reasonable life. Tell them it's luck. Tell them to follow their passion. Tell them it's because others have White Privilege. Tell them they don't need to do a STEM subject at university. Tell them they are healthy at any size or weight. Tell them it's the Patriarchy, all-powerful and never-ending. Tell them it's Racism, all-powerful and endemic. Tell them that all identities are based on being a victim, and if they try to work their way out of victimhood, they will lose their identity, and (horrors) become white.

The real function of the "Luxury Beliefs" identified by Rob Henderson is to handicap the gullible, while pretending to be on their side.

Next time someone gets woke on you, smile and say "Ah. Luxury beliefs." Like "First World problems".



(*)Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. (Matthew 7:14)

Vapour Trails

 I took this about 07:30 in mid-May.

Whenever the planes stop flying, the skies around where I live clear up and stay that way for days.

Until you see it, you don't believe it.

Vapour trails are water, by the way.

Not carbon dioxide.

Which is good for plants.

But let's not go there.

Look at the pretty vapour trails!

Burgers 'N Fries, Camden Lock

 Sis and I went to Camden Lock recently, by way of the gardens in Regent's Park, and even in the middle of the week, when it's raining, the place is busy busy busy. And it hasn't changed since whenever the last big refurbishment was... ten years ago? I suggest clicking on this to enlarge and appreciate the calm absorption with which the chef is working.

How To Do A Good Rodchenko Tilt

Is this picture skew or it is just from an odd angle?

I thought it was skew until I checked the tower on the right-hand side.

It's vertical.

So not skew then.

But it looks skew.

Because it's taken from an odd angle, and the perspective is all over the place.

So your eye, and mine, spends most of its energy trying to sort out how the camera angle is wrong, so it can correct it.

That probably means a) it's a not-good photo, b) I'm a second Rodchenko.

So it's not a good photo.

When Rodchenko tilted his camera, somehow, the perspective remained comprehensible. Your eye says he forgot to put the camera straight, and adjusted accordingly.

With my photo, everything is so messed-up, you can't see what's wrong.

It's about doing something enough so it is intentional. Once our eye spots `intention', it can work out what that might be and correct for it. So this is an okay Rodchenko imitation....

but for this one, well, I just can't shoot a straight horizon...

Why I Let My Art Newspaper Subscription Lapse

Dear Editor,

My subscription to Art News ran out recently and I am not renewing.

I thought I would tell you why.

I made a mistake subscribing in the first place.

I thought Art News would be to the art-world what, for instance, the FT is to business.

Sure you have a certain amount of insider favour-trading and re-cycling of press releases in the FT, as in any newspaper.

Along with articles about how Western Civilisation will crumble if the Government gives one penny less to the Arts than it did last year.

That goes with the territory.

It's the delicate souls a-flutter at a two-hundred year old transgression of this year's taboo.

The use of -isms to splash `political' meaning onto empty work.

When a museum `apologises' for its `implication in slavery', its PR department counts the column-inches it generates.

I am not interested in the moral character or beliefs of artists / curators / gallerists / researchers / restorers / dealers / whatever else.

I want to read about the work they are doing.

Not what they are saying to demonstrate their candidacy for in-group membership.

So I didn't renew my subscription.

Regards

A Former Subscriber

The National Windrush Memorial, Waterloo Station

The SS Windrush docked at Tilbury on 22 June 1948 with 802 people from the Caribbean. The BBC says so. Tilbury is on the Fenchurch Steet line, which does not pass Waterloo at any time. Maybe the monument is going on tour or maybe the artist insisted that it was somewhere people actually passed through. Waterloo is still the busiest passenger terminus in the UK by long stretch.

That's not why I like this photograph. I like it because of the people around the monument. I don't usually do people in my photographs, and it's something I want to change.