The passport says I’m an international woman of mystery

International travel hasn’t featured much on my calendar for a very long time. For the upcoming jolly to Berlin, I’d need my passport, which I haven’t seen for years. I found it in a file marked ‘official stuff’. It was in an envelope, and expired in 2018.

Naturally this set off a panic attack of major proportions. I seemed to remember there was a passport office in Glasgow and thought you could do a sort of high-speed mission to get a one-day renewal service.

Frantic googling confirmed that you can, if you can actually get one of the appointments and are able to streak through to a city which at that point was in a sort of gridlocked chaos on account of a vape shop combusting. Oh, and are willing to shell out £222!

Couldn’t really grouse about it, since it was me who clearly forgot to do anything about the passport in the first place.

In the envelope I found another passport. This one expired a very long time ago. In the last century, in fact. Its black cover is magnificently imposing and inside there is a little monochrome photo-booth picture of a young woman with masses of weirdly curly dark hair and huge brown eyes. She’s a lot prettier than I remember or than she thought. Wish I could go back and tell her just how darned good she looked.

Then I noticed the burgundy passport had a corner missing. It had been officially clipped. When I checked the envelope it had been hiding in, lo and behold, I found yet another passport. This one expires in 2030. At some point, I had renewed my passport. Well, what can I say?

Thanks, 2020 Susan. Don’t recall doing that at all, but there was a bit of a pandemic brewing, so that could be why it slipped my memory.

This one has a terrible photo. Much worse than the 1978 or the 2018 version. I look like the sort of woman who starts fights outside flat-roofed pubs in Paisley.

I seriously doubt the Germans are going to let me in.