Stamp collecting

Sadly for me, the passport which has served me so well over the last 10 years, was due to expire in April 2010. And, since many countries have a policy which states that you’re not welcome unless you have at least six months validity on your passport, I had to bite the bullet and replace it.

I had mixed feelings about doing this. See, I quite liked the photo that was in there, and I can still remember the day I went down to Westfield Strathpine to have it taken. I was so stoked that I was getting my passport, and even more stoked that my work (Mincom at the time) was paying for it (I needed it for a work trip to the USA)! Consequently, I had a huge smile on my face in the photo, which was fine in those days, as this was long before the government decided that sporting anything other than a neutral expression meant that you were a terrorist.

Unfortunately though, along with my happiness, the photo also showed my ignorance. It didn’t occur to me that wearing a white shirt in front of a white background would effectively render the shirt non-existant, and so in the photo I’m actually just a floating head. But still, it’s a cool photo.

Of course, the other reason that I didn’t want to let go was due to the stamps that I’ve acquired over the years. Sure, there was still a boatload of empty pages towards the end of the passport, but I’d certainly made a good effort of filling up the front half!

But on the upside, I’m pretty sure that the death of my old passport will also finally be the death of my old childhood signature. I think I was about 10 years old when I first had to sign something, and of course at that point I was more concerned with coming up with a signature that looked very elaborate, rather than one that remotely resembled my name. And over the years, the elaborate swirls just got more and more exaggerated; by the time I finally decided that enough was enough, you could have been forgiven for looking at my signature and thinking my name was “88mo8″. Friends just call me “Mo”.

Anyway – my new signature is much more suave, and I particularly like the way I make the “T” in “Thomas” look like the famous “F” in “Fender”. I think it gives me a particular hard-core, rockstar edge, and I think that immigration officials will recognise this when they see it in my shiny new passport.

Even better, with our trip to Brussels on the weekend, I’ve already scored three shiny new stamps, and as this photo expertly taken by Todd shows, two of them were even considerately placed on the same page! (I also love that in the EU, the stamp shows the mode of transport that you used to enter the country – notice the little train in the top-right hand corner of the stamp?)

Overall, it’s a happy ending for my old passport. See, my UK visa doesn’t automatically get transferred over to the new one, unless I send both of them to the British embassy and pay them a small, large processing fee. So even though I’m now sporting the latest and greatest in Australian passport technology, old faithful will still live on for a few years yet!