A ´cautionary tale
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison…
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The one thing that makes living in this sun-denuded dungeon bearable is our ability to escape it. We are the undisputed leaders and hub of the budget airline industry, carrying some 80 million passengers around Europe each year, with 60 million of them starting or ending their journey in the UK. Unable to bear it much longer, and finding a window for a long weekend to Spain for guaranteed sun, I resolved to swell their ranks (how was I to know the sun had only been awaiting my departure to show his face?). I booked my ticket, whooped with joy, and then went to fetch my passport.
It was then than I noticed my passport was also a little under the weather. An accident with some vodka a few years back had finally taken its toll. Not on me - that horse is well and truly bolted - but my picture, or rather the plastic cover on the photo page, which was coming apart. Hmm, thinks I. They might think I´ve been tampering with it and not let me into Spain. I must ´fix it´. And so with skill, and care and cunning, I put a wee dob of fixative between plastic and card, wiped it clean, pressed it together and resolved to get a new one when I´m back from my trip. If it is wise to quit when one is ahead, it would have been wise to quit then. But for some reason I decided that the final touch was needed, and this involved pressing it with a hot iron. You snort do you? You are fully aware that this is a stupid thing to do, are you? So am I, now. I´m an expert on how misguided this is, and became so the moment I removed the piece of paper I had carefully lain across between iron and plastic (I´m stupid, but not that stupid), to be confronted by the above frightful spectacle. The rotting of a corpse in a wattery grave was not more horrible, as Wilde described the picture of Dorian Gray eaten by the leprosies of sin. I wouldn´t mind, but I hadn´t had half the fun he had to have a portrait like that. Worse, I had 4 days before my flight. It was now a Saturday morning, and I had a passport photo that looked like it had been painted by Edvard Munch. The only way the Spanish immigration were going to let me in is if I contracted a raging palsy before embarking. If the apolplexy I was then suffering didn´t get me first.
On enquiry, I discovered for replacement passports, the best they could manage was a week (and 109 quid). I´d need counter-signed photos by a respeatable person who´d known me more than 2 years (a small pool as my Dorian-like portrait suggests). I quickly relealised I was stuck in Britain. Beyond the sun beat down; I had booked my ticket, but here it looked likely I would have to stay. A week and my window would close. And I thought I was miserable before. Tbc...
