A little bit of politics...Privacy insurance

On May 1st, I applied to renew my Passport. I have actually held two for a number of years, mainly due working in Countries that need you to apply for Visas. I found out in the 80s that being a globetrotting troubleshooter wasn't much use if my passport was languishing in the Saudi arabian Embassy for several days. The Passport people are happy for you to hold another passport if there is a genuine need.

I re-applied for a second Passport about nine years ago when I was self-employed- I had to provide a letter of justification from my Employer to secure this and I took great delight in writing the letter as Company Secretary and Managing Director of Delicolor Ltd, confirming that the Company's sole employee (me) had a genuine need.

The older passport lapsed in March this year and my current one was good until mid-2007. However, I am very conscious of all this ID card malarkey where "voluntary" cards are going to be compulsory if you want to travel. To defer this as long as possible, now is the time to renew your Passport which in theory will enable you to resist the insidious piece of plastic until 2016 (or February 2017 in my case, as they carried forward ten months of non-elapsed time from my current one.)

The No2ID campaign is encouraging people to renew during May as a protest vote and you can find the details here. It currently costs £51 but expect that to go up considerably next year. After all, we have to pay for the new interview centres where future applicants will have to go to in order to prove who they say they are...

I'm pleased to say that it turned up quickly enough, as did my two old ones (with the corners cut off to void them).