My new passport arrived today. I’ve been putting off blogging about this, because announcing to the world that a brand-new passport is arriving in the mail didn’t seem so very smart. Now that it’s here and I don’t have to keep quiet any more, I feel I must give some advice to anyone in my situation (viz., far from home): don’t send your passport through the washing machine.

Very important, that. Especially, don’t send your passport through the washing machine when you’re pretty soon going to need it (for instance, when you get back from Poland and within a month you have to leave again for Italy). Because if you’re as far from home as I am, you’ll have to send an application for a new one to London, and pay them lots of money. If you’re on an even tighter schedule than mine was, you’ll have to pay then lots and lots of money (the cost for urgent three-day processing is a cool £124 —yep, that’s pounds— plus thirty for courier service).

On the plus side, I have a pretty new passport. Unfortunately, I got my old one in the days when a passport was valid for ten years, so the new five-year deadline actually cuts its lifetime down by two. But the new one does have a “contactless integrated circuit chip” in the back. The notice on the chip says “take caution that this passport not become wet, folded or mutilated.” Wish they’d had that on the old one.

Speaking of which, they also sent it back. So I still have my (pathetically small) collection of visa stamps. They chopped various strategic bits off, so it won’t be of any use to anyone — not that it would have anyway, the washing machine damage has left all the information visible but the passport itself looking like an extremely unprofessional fake. Some pretty nice ink-spreading effects though.

Kids: don’t do this at home. Or if you absolutely have to, choose Mummy’s or Daddy’s passport, ok? You want to take care of your own.