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Mar. 14th, 2011 05:00 pmWe're currently wrestling with the British embassy & consulate who, in their infinite wisdom, have decreed that all UK passports issued to expats in Western European countries can only be issued via the Paris embassy. Naturally, there will be disproportionate fees & delays and generally processing nonsense (registered post, certification of documents etc etc) - and the earliest we can reasonably expect to have a passport for Daniel would be June or July, even if he turns up on time. And no, they cannot issue Emergency Transport Documents for children as the 'risk of children smuggling' is just too high, which is obviously the reason why they changed the old rules, where you could travel on your parents passport, despite the blood-pressure-raising-bureaucratic-madness that it imposes on parents. Plus postage, of course.
We could go to the Paris office and apply in person, but they don't guarantee that they will issue documents on anything like a reasonable basis - so we could well be stuck in Paris, with a newborn baby and even less facilities than usual, waiting for our turn to be called, potentially for several days. Oddly, this doesn't appeal.
In short, the sensation of feeling utterly, utterly trapped is palpable as there is no other point in the last 2 years that this could conceivably have been an issue; and now it is. In spades. When we're unable to move, this happens. Despite evidence to the contrary, I cannot quite believe that this is anything other than deliberate, because it just sucks.
C, as you might expect, has taken the news badly; she wants to return home, but being told that she has to wait the best part of 3 months before she can make the attempt has really not gone down well.
S
We could go to the Paris office and apply in person, but they don't guarantee that they will issue documents on anything like a reasonable basis - so we could well be stuck in Paris, with a newborn baby and even less facilities than usual, waiting for our turn to be called, potentially for several days. Oddly, this doesn't appeal.
In short, the sensation of feeling utterly, utterly trapped is palpable as there is no other point in the last 2 years that this could conceivably have been an issue; and now it is. In spades. When we're unable to move, this happens. Despite evidence to the contrary, I cannot quite believe that this is anything other than deliberate, because it just sucks.
C, as you might expect, has taken the news badly; she wants to return home, but being told that she has to wait the best part of 3 months before she can make the attempt has really not gone down well.
S