My blue passport has arrived – and with it a crushing new sense of our Brexit nightmare
In February, I lost my passport in the stupidest way yet. I was not mugged, pickpocketed or burgled (passports one to three), I did not drop it in a pond (passport four), or lose it in a house move (passport five), I just walked through a station in a bit of a daze, and by the time I got to my platform, it was gone. I tried to self-soothe with the fact that, at least I now had time to renew before the blue ones came in, but that plan did not square with the global pandemic, and the document arrived today, as blue as midnight and also as dark.
Some observations: we definitely are not in the EU any more. There are no stars, just a lion, a unicorn and a peculiar and bereft illustration of the UK, with Northern Ireland a floating blob, the rest of the landmass etched out like Trotsky’s face. I don’t know why I should find this so disappointing. Obviously on some subconscious level, I thought it was all a dream, or a joke.
The colour, meanwhile, is not the nostalgia kick you might have hoped for, if that was your thing, since it genuinely is blue, while the pre-EU ones looked more like black. This somehow says it all about the Brexit project, that it would fight to the death over a principle that was trivial and wrong. Three flowers and a shamrock are embossed on the back, for poetry I suppose, except the daffodil could be any flower, and the overall effect is of someone finding free graphics on the internet for a superbly boring PowerPoint presentation.
Yet by far the worst thing about it was my own photo, as ever, contriving to look meaner and more like Myra Hindley than the last, which was itself the worst picture I had ever taken. Remarkably, and powerfully, this lifted my spirits. Some things never change. Every passport has a worse photo than the last – even, mysteriously, one you lost after only six months. But everything else can change, and who knows, by 2030, the blue years could be over.