Poor Z Williams. As if covid wasn't enough, now the final insult of having to carry a blue passport. This is one of the many important symbolic issues that have puzzled me. Why is it so important to the new petitie bourgeoisie (UrbanJournalist Faction)?
My blue passport has arrived – and with it a crushing new sense of our Brexit nightmare
We definitely are not in the EU any more. No stars, just a lion, a unicorn and a peculiar illustration of the UK. Yet that’s not even the worst thing about this document
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. [Well yes -- but isn't that you Remainers?] 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.
No taste, these ghastly Brexiteers. The shame! It's far more personal than that though:
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.
Overall --a valiant attempt to fill space in the Silly Season but even more absurd and contradictory than usual. Would her photo have looked better in a pinky/brown cover?
For me the real story lies in the background:
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
Pretty unlikely I would say, especially the last one. Bit of a daze? Lost mysteriously after six months? Williams is obviously selling passports to or being targeted by people smugglers.
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