Passport Photo Blues

‘Gosh, is that you?’

Don’t you hate it when a friend, flicking through your family album, blinks at the beaming young blonde on the page and then looks back at you with a look of vague incredulity?

I couldn’t believe what I saw either - when the woman in the photo shop in Fleet handed me my newly taken passport photo. My face fell, even more than that of the middle aged, po-faced, jowly woman staring back at me.

 In school I used to be called sulky Helen because my face, in repose, has a kind of hang dog expression.

‘Miserable as sin’ was Granny’s response to that kind of look followed by the God-fearing admonition –

‘If the wind changes your face will stay like that.’

The photographer gently awoke me from my gloomy reverie and said, with her best counselling- support voice –

‘Don’t worry love, nobody likes their passport photo.’

Now, in all my years of crossing country borders I have never, ever, been challenged or questioned by the powers that be.

Not once.

Was it my goody two-shoes innocent expression?  If they only knew... 

Or did they just not really look, like that journalist who stuck a photo of a horse’s head in his passport and was waved gaily through.

I’ve tried my best to get noticed and challenged, just for the hell of it. My claims at the Dutch border to be a rabid Welsh nationalist about to commit arson on English owned holiday homes in Wales were met with guffaws of laughter. 

Attempts at cracking jokes with East Berlin border guards backfired badly. A stony silence from them was broken by a furious hiss from the British Council representative (accompanying us students) –

‘Shut up for God’s sake.’

And so, since my passport arrived I have embarked on a new regime:-

Mornings I contort my face à la Eve Fraser’s facial exercises in front of my boudoir mirror, curtains drawn slightly in case the post man sees and remembers those NHS stroke alerts. 

Afternoons consist of light exercises and weights. My new fitbit, welded to my wrist, duly records my 10,000 daily steps. No alcohol has passed my lips for a fortnight. This is despite a daily, (around 7pm), involuntary twitching of my left hand towards an amputated imaginary glass of Chablis. 

Looking back morosely at the family album I found a picture which would have had a good laugh at my older self’s predicament.  Here I am, non- passport approved.

I’m off to Russia on hols in a fortnight. I really hope my new regime has had some effect. 

Despite these times of international tension I long to be taken aside at border control. 

For the passport official to look up with a look of vague incredulity and exclaim –

‘Gosh! Is that you?’