United Kingdom

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple”

Oscar Wilde

It need hardly be said that the truth is far from being the only thing that is ‘never simple’ and I could – at this point – be referring to any one of a great number of subjects. Those who pursue the many strands of this online delectus will not, however, be surprised at my current target.

As divulged within these meditations but a few posts back, I am currently engaged with the relevant authorities in the pursuit of an application for Canadian citizenship, as well as for the renewal of both my Canadian permanent residence card and my UK passport. Anything connected to citizenship or passports can be guaranteed to conceal a veritable minefield of obstacles, obfuscation, obstruction, obscurement and obduration.

The opening salvoes in this particular engagement were fired back at the start of July and things had reached the point – I surmised – that it was time to sit back and to wait for the inevitable interminable months to pass before anything further happened.

With regard to my UK passport renewal I had – as directed – completed and submitted the online application form and – somewhat nervously – entrusted my current passport to Canada Post (cue sharp intake of breath) in the expectation that it would wing its way back over the pond to Durham (in the UK) whence it had originally come.

Somewhat to my surprise I received, a couple of days ago, an email from the UK Passport Office advising me to do (again?) what I had already done. Naturally I had sent the precious document by recorded delivery, so I was able to check the tracking log. According to Canada Post’s records my passport had been delivered to Durham on July 9th – some two weeks ago. I figured that the best thing to do was to call the UK Passport Office to check that it had – in fact – arrived.

Easier said than done, of course!

Using Skype to make a trans-Atlantic call at a reasonable rate I suffered the expected multiple attempts at connection before finally a ‘ring tone’ was heard and I shortly thereafter found myself listening to the usual robotic instructions. After the familiar ritual of the system refusing to acknowledge that I had in fact pressed the numbers that I had, I reached – on the fourth or fifth attempt – an accommodation with the insensate automaton by which it agreed to connect me with my desired service if I were prepared first to listen to a whole bunch of badly recorded music punctuated by incessant and identical informational missives.

Eventually the call was picked up – not by a real live human (oh no!) but by another machine. This one had but a single purpose in mind. It demanded that I key-in a telephone number on which I could – at some unspecified point in the future – be called back. I could not – naturally – recall the correct recipe for calling Canada from the UK in the first instance, but eventually the machine seemed to be satisfied and abruptly disconnected me.

I thought that I had better check what was likely to happen next, so I approached the InterWebNet with a suitable query to determine what experiences others had had with this ‘service’. I rapidly discovered that my call-back might be anything up to about three days in coming. Given that there is an eight hour time difference between the west coast of Canada and the cathedral city of Durham it further seemed likely that the call would come sometime in the middle of the night – assuming that whoever made the call might not figure out that he – or she – was calling the far side of the world.

The Girl made it clear that this meant one or more nights on the sofa for me as she had no intention of being woken at some god-forsaken hour by a disinterested British bureaucrat.

I was sleeping the sleep of the just at five thirty the following morning when the phone duly rang.

“Good afternoon” – quoth a British voice (betraying the fact that – as suspected – my being a number of time-zones away from Blighty had escaped their notice) – “How can I help?“. The transition from being in deep REM sleep to having to explain why I was calling the far side of world went more successfully than might have been expected and the northern gentleman explained that – though my passport had undoubtedly reached them on July 9th, it would take a further ten to fourteen days for it to be entered into the ‘system’ – and until such time as it had done so the clock did not start ticking on the processing of my application.

There was a brief pause as we each mentally ticked off the two weeks that had already elapsed since my passport had reached Durham.

“I expect it will show up any day now” – he said, slightly unconvincingly. I mentioned that I lived on the west coast of Canada – more than anything to let him know why I felt so exposed as a result of not being in possession of a passport. “Ah!” – he exclaimed, unable to hide a note of triumph in his voice. “If you have sent your passport from abroad it takes three weeks for it to appear on the system!“.

Riiiiiiight!

Oh well – nothing to do but to wait – and to simply swat away any further spurious requests to send back my precious passport.