Paperless

Not in the sense of ’we live in a paperless society’, meaning you have everything on your phone, which refuses to work as soon as you need to produce the bumph on screen.

Rather in the sense of being without the documents you require to live in countries or travel between them.

I confess I’m more than a little careless or unlucky (you choose) with the second alternative.

The problems started when I was teaching English in Italy, back in the eighties.

My work position was too say the least wobbly. I was a member of the precariat long before the term became current.

I’d originally been taken on in a private school in a small city in Northern Italy while a less wobbly member of staff was on maternity leave. When my post wasn’t renewed, I over-compensated and ended up working in two different cities (Asti and Turin) and four different schools, along with a number of private lessons. I clocked up over 40 hours a week. This was more than enough to get by. In fact, I was killing myself by degrees. But then no-one had told me that the forty-hour week did not for teachers mean contact hours. And then again, given my earlier problems with job security, I thought it better to have four or five fallbacks.

More fool me, then.

But this is really beside the main point.

I needed papers for all this. Despite both Britain and Italy being in what was then the EC (European Community, in case you’d forgotten), to live in Italy I needed a permesso di soggiorno (residence permit), and to work there I needed a libretto di lavoro (work permit).Without these, I couldn’t live, work or open a bank account there. Legally, anyway.

So I was grateful that the various schools helped out. They gave me the papers I needed to get the papers I needed from the local questura (police office – do you know nothing?). I simply had to renew the residence at given intervals. A pain in the arse, but there you go.

The real problem began when I was unjustly but understandably accused of terrorism.

I’d been out one night with one of my private students celebrating his birthday. When the bar closed, we walked back through town. He and his cousin towards their homes; I to my moped. (I lived in a shack a few klicks away at the time.)

My attention was suddenly caught by a police car stopping right in front of me. My attention grew considerably when two carabinieri (paramilitary police, to you) got out holding machine guns and pointed them at me.

I bade them a good evening and raised my hands in surrender for something. Then looked behind me. My friends were still writing something on a wall about 20 metres back. This soon stopped. As did my heart for a moment.

You will recall, if you are old enough, that the seventies and eighties in Italy were the heyday of the Red Brigades, amongst other far-left and right groups. Several atrocities, including the murder of a leading politician, had been laid at the door of the Brigate Rosse. The government responded by imposing something as close to martial law as such a laidback country could manage. Which meant in effect awarding the police extra powers and added jumpiness. Both manifested themselves when members of the public start painting Brigate Rosse in open spaces.

As we were transported in cuffs back to the station, my friends helpfully explained that they’d intended to write Brigate Rotte. This means Broken Brigades and would have been a very witty joke, had they got beyond the letter ‘o’. Since they hadn’t, we were in deep merda (you can work that one out, surely).

We spent the night at the police station. I was drunk enough to find the whole business amusing and spent some of the time singing Irish rebel songs for the hell of it. The police didn’t share the joke. Nor did my friends.

At one point, I was hauled before a maresciallo. This means marshal and is a rank in the armed or semi-armed forces. Interestingly enough, in Sweden it’s the name given to a candle designed to show you where a party is taking place. I don’t think the carabinieri would have found that funny either. Some of them did laugh however, when I was told to strip in front of five policemen and one journalist, who kept demanding I should be charged so he would have a story.

Now I hadn’t realised northern Italian winters would be quite so cold when I did my packing, nor that my shack would be an icebox. So I’d asked my lovely landlord for some rags to block the draughts. Some of these rags turned out to be relatively serviceable underwear. They had their flaws, usually in the form of holes in vital places. But they were better than nothing.

The holes in vital places at least helped to relax the atmosphere a little. And obviated the need for me to strip completely.

So far so good, I thought. Just a few more jokes and these guys will be completely onside. My good spirits were in no way dispelled when I was returned to the corridor under armed guard. Nor was I daunted when one of the guards stuck his gun in my face and explained that a friend of his had been killed by the Brigades and if it was up to him….

In the middle of the night I was woken up to be taken to the little shanty I liked to call home, be it ever so Antarctic. As the leading policeman opened the gate, I warned him about the dogs. The two uniforms raised their machine-guns as the puppies rushed out to greet them. Still no sign of a sense of humour. The policemen glared at me even as I explained how the ultra-friendly bitch I’d been assigned to look after had been obliged to back up to a pile of planks in the yard to accommodate the attentions of the stunted growth that passed for next door’s dog.

They ransacked the cottage before taking me back to join the other two at the station. It wasn’t till early morning that my student’s father came along and bailed out his son and nephew. I don’t know if he vouched for me too. Or whether the police couldn’t think what to do with me having released the real culprits. But they let me go too. Sort of….

The conditions of my student’s bail seemed to be that his father would act as security for his son’s good conduct. It turned out that he followed his son round doggedly over the next few weeks, even trying to hide behind lampposts and in doorways to avoid detection.

For my part, the effects were longer-lasting and less remediable. Despite the fact that I worked most officially in Asti – at a state secretarial school, and that I lived in the municipality, the local police decided that I should be registered with the police in Turin. Turin claimed the opposite. I spent the next eighteen months shuttling between the questure of the two cities. The end result was that the police in Turin told me to tell the police in Asti to stop ‘breaking the box’. Since I didn’t know what the term meant, they explained with ‘making their balls girate’, which I did understand. It didn’t help. For the remainder of my time in the country I remained an illegal immigrant. It was not to be the only time.

Personally, I think in this case, I was the victim of a combination of an over-zealous state and rank bad luck. The same couldn’t be said of the next problems I had with my papers in Italy.

I’ll be brief. Through embarrassment as much as anything else.

I’d just clocked off after my first full year in the country. As I mentioned, I’d worked my ballcocks and floats off, and now had money in my bank and in my pocket. Or rather in my shoulder bag, which contained my final pay packet from my main job, my yearly bonus of two months extra salary, and my savings bank book. Along with my passport for good measure. And I celebrated as any reasonable soul would, though rather more than was strictly reasonable. The next morning I woke up in the flat of a friend who had an interesting collection of erotica, which occupied my attention for a while. I then went to get my things together and couldn’t find them. More specifically, the bag.

Investigations at the bar in question proved fruitless. And when I got back to Asti, I found my account had been cleared out. The thief was obviously more familiar with Italian banking customs than I was. All he had to do was present himself with my savings book and ID (ie passport) and he could withdraw as much as he wanted. That is to say, the whole bloody lot.

So I was pretty much destitute. In the absence of money and passport, I couldn’t even go back to Britain. I was obliged (not for the first or last time) to throw myself on the kindness of strangers. Some of my private students had a whip-round which kept my head above water level and allowed me to travel down to Genoa to get my passport replaced. As for the rest, I survived through to the wine harvest (vendemmia for those of you still willing to learn). The pay wasn’t great, but at least the food and wine were included.

The next country I worked in was Egypt. And there I managed to remain legal document-wise. And I lasted almost the whole of my tour of duty in the good old USS of R without (much) mishap. This was the late eighties and the age of Cuddly Gorby, glasnost and perestroika. Then I still had a bad habit of taking politicians at their word. So when CG (see above) announced a new era of openness and freedom, I decided to go out in a blaze of glory and embark on a totally unauthorised trip. The idea was to visit the Baltic republics, then make my way up to Russian Karelia to a dump called Petrozavodsk. The one big attraction there was a lake island where there was a complex of beautiful wooden churches.

You might ask how I even managed to get plane tickets without an internal visa. (Actually, if you did ask this, I would suspect you were really a retired Soviet sleeper agent. I mean how exactly did you know a visa would be needed?) This I fixed by wangling, through a friendly contact, an invitation to the English Department of the University of Tallinn for a series of non-existent lectures. So Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius went off without a problem, even if they were all, like Yerevan where I’d been working, in a more or less open state of revolt. I recall a visit to the beach where hundreds of Latvians had gathered to send up balloons with messages for the west. The wind approved and blew them in the right direction. There was even a wide-eyed young priest who dissected the Soviet anthem arguing with each word. (It begins ‘Indestructible union of free republics’ – go figure.)

The main difficulty arose with the trip to the North. I’m not sure how forbidden this was, but the fact that it lay close to the border with Finland would suggest it was a pretty touchy area, especially since the Finns wanted Karelia back. So, to be on the safe side a friend in Leningrad bought us (me plus unwitting accomplice in crime) return train tickets to Petrozavodsk. It was a sleeper (train this time, so don’t worry), so we’d have the whole day up there before catching the night train back south.

And a very jolly day we had too. I can really recommend the churches, and if you’re heavily into mosquitoes, this is an absolute must-see. To top it all, when we got back to Petro-Zee, the bar we chose to hole up in as we waited for the train was showing England playing in the World Cup. I fancy it was the match against Cameroon.

The upshot, I’m sure you’ve guessed was that we missed our train back. Another, the last, came a little later, but the conductress manage to resist my very resistible charms, even when combined with a backhander, and refused to allow us on.

I suppose we could have spent the night in the train station, though this might have roused the suspicion of the local police. There was absolutely no chance of us booking into a hotel without papers. What’s more, we had to be back in Leningrad the next day if we were to catch the Moscow train we had tickets for. It was not so much the fact we’d be losing a few roubles if we wasted the chance. It was rather that all trains between the two cities were usually booked up months in advance. And we also had a plane to catch back to Britain. From Moscow, it goes without saying.

So I sized up the taxi rank, which was impressively full of cabs. Surely one of them would take us the 450 km back to base? At night? Without papers? Ever so slightly inebriated?

Well, one driver was open to persuasion. Admittedly, his looks weren’t in his favour. He was snag-toothed, wall-eyed and unshaven, and had long greasy hair. He also wore tattoos – usually a sign that someone had been in the labour camps or was on their way there. His car was an unmarked chastnik or private vehicle and had a plastic skull hanging from the mirror. But he clearly had a heart of gold, since he’d agreed to take us back.

Or not as the case maybe. He dropped us at the end of Leningrad friend’s road in the early hours. It was only when he’d driven off that I found he’d raided my man bag while we’d been asleep. This contained my Russian money, my passport and visa, my air ticket out of the country and my bank cards.

Sound familiar?

Darn, I said to myself.

My Russian friend’s neighbour turned out to be in the KGB and tried to be helpful, or at least claimed he’d tried. In the meantime, I phoned the Embassy in Moscow to see what they could do and what I should do. The Cultural Secretary consulted the local secretary, a Russian blonde with biceps who was all too easy to visualise in a KGB uniform. The CultSec told me they could fix the passport, cancel the cards and rearrange the air ticket. (There was no way we were going to get back to Moscow on time to catch the original flight for reasons that will soon become clear.) But I would have to fix the visa myself. The visa in question was called an ‘exit visa’. You needed it to leave the country. I hated to think what the punishment for losing it would be.

Then the real fun began. To get a new exit visa, I would first have to register the theft with the Leningrad police. This turned out to be a harassed-looking but patient plainclothes fellow, who transcribed my dictated statement, pointed out there was no chance of catching the culprit (presumably everyone in Petrozavodsk had tattoos and snag-teeth) and asked me to sign the declaration.

Next we had to get back to Moscow. This was impossible by plane because I didn’t have a passport. Train was easier, if someone else (that is, Leningrad friend) bought the tickets for us. The problem was there weren’t any. Tickets, that is. As anticipated, the Leningrad-Moscow trains were booked up for weeks ahead. Nonetheless my friend managed to persuade the conductor to give his cabin over to us for the night. Luckily my travelling companion has managed to keep her money safer than mine, so we had enough to pay the bribe.

You might have thought that’d be the end of it. In that case, you’ve never experienced the full rigours of Soviet bureaucracy, which seemed designed more with the destruction of the soul in mind than the achieving of results.

I first visited the External Relations Department of Moscow State University. I’d worked at the uni when I arrived in the USSR. The same fire-breather was in charge and viewed me with glee, then directed me to a different office, which then directed me to a third one. Which was closed. The day of departure was drawing near. My soul was on the point of spontaneous combustion. Finally, the third office opened, gave me a piece of paper and a stamp and sent me off to a fourth office. Which would open the next day not so bright and early, not long before the plane was due to leave. I waited in what passed for a queue in the Sov U. The others in the waiting room were mainly from developing countries and were much more familiar with Darwinian queuing systems.

I finally got to the front and the official closed the window saying ‘lunch’.

I don’t really have a panic mode. My response in cases like this is for my brain to go into lockdown and my body into a catatonic state. I collapsed in a seat, and head in hands contemplated my future in Siberia. Luckily I had a friend outside. Just for the sake of variety (and anonymity) I’ll called him the Moscow friend. He’d been in his car, waiting to take me to the airport in his car. He was warm-hearted beneath a gruff exterior – like most of the people in the country if you took the trouble to get to know them and they took the trouble to allow you. But I’d never seen him being charming before.

Before you could say Edvard Shevardnadze, he’d persuaded Cerberus to open the portal and stamp my passport with the needed exit visa.

He then drove the Lada hell for leather (41 mph turbo-charged) to the airport where I was just in time to board the Air France plane. There began my loveless affair with Charles de Gaulle airport. It comes bottom of my fave list and top of my hit list. The baggage handlers were on strike and we were delayed half a day in our wait for the connecting flight. And needless to say the staff were rude and explained nothing.

Ha! I thought triumphantly as I swigged from my bottle of duty-free Stolly. In the Soviet Union, they wouldn’t have dared.

Well, youth will have its fling. I was 35 years old when I left the USSR. I’m still waiting to make the move into maturity, 35 years later. Instead I moved to Sweden. This was Western Europe (well, sort of north-west, come to think of it) and a liberal democracy (sort of liberal, anyway). Surely it was idiot-proof. Meaning, even I couldn’t fuck up here, paper-wise.

Judge for yourself.

On arrival, I managed to get what I needed. I didn’t get much help from my workplace since I hadn’t yet worked out the fundamental Swedish basis of requesting information. The trick of this is that yes/ no questions are preferable. Which means that you have to know the right question to ask. If you don’t, you will have to work it out for yourself when the first answer sends you down a blind alley.

At the time, Sweden was not a member of the EU. So I needed a visa, as well as work and residence permits. The first was arranged by the Embassy in London before I left. The other two were dependent on my first securing a Personal Number and ID card, so I could be officially registered in the Swedish population (and be taxed for it). In Sweden, all else follows on from that. It is the means of securing your identity and proving it.

Apropos of which, I have always wondered why the British have such an inbuilt antipathy to the idea of identity cards. They certainly make life easier and fraud less likely. I recall that a utility bill used to be proof of both person and address when applying for anything from a library card to a bank loan. For some reasons, Swedes simply refuse to believe me when I point this out. The principle is a good one I suppose. The less a government knows about you, the better. But I’d have thought the surveillance cameras placed at intervals of 100 metres throughout the country were a more obvious threat to freedom from official snooping. Yet they seem to be accepted and even welcomed in most quarters. And, I expect, those are the quarters that would die rather than take out an identity card.

Oh well.

So now I was fully armed and ready to take my place as a fine upstanding member of the Folk Home or Welfare State called Sweden. Even if I had to renew my residence permit at six-monthly intervals until I was promoted to a three-year contract. By which time Sweden had joined the EU.

It was then I made my first mistake. It’s so long ago that I can’t remember what gave me the idea. Whether it was some mischievous incubus that came and whispered porkies in my ear when I was asleep. Or whether I simply assumed that bureaucracies were more rational than they are.

To wit. Membership of the EU guarantees the Famous Four Freedoms, the last of which promises free movement of the person to ‘live, work and study’ in member countries ‘without undue restriction’. Now any reasonable person (that is, me) would assume that a resident permit was an ‘undue restriction’.

So.

I decided I no longer needed to make my way out to what was called at the time the National Swedish Immigration and Naturalisation Board in order to remain legally in the country. And so I didn’t. After all, if I was wrong about this, then they would surely remind me. I was, and they didn’t.

As I found out when at the beginning of this century, the UK and Sweden allowed mutual double citizenship. So OK. If I’m honest, the idea of having two passports was the main motivation. But it wasn’t just that it appealed to the James Bond hidden deep down in me. After Britain joined the USA in invading Iraq on an invented pretext, I also figured that it might be safer occasionally to travel on a Swedish passport.

But.

When I applied, I received a reply pointing out that in order to be granted a Swedish passport, I would first have to be officially resident in the country. And, as you’ll already have worked out, I wasn’t. To apply for residency, I would have to return to the UK and present myself and related documents at the Swedish Embassy in London and then wait for an indefinite period for my application to be considered.

Now you need to keep a sense of perspective here. After all there are millions of poor bastards in a similar but much worse situation. Unlike my case, this is through no fault of their own. Rather it’s down to a wish to have somewhere to live and work that hasn’t been fucked over by colonisation, war or the destruction of the environment. It goes without saying that all of those calamities have usually been perpetrated by the countries that refuse them entry.

But since I had a full-time job and a full-time wife, the idea did not appeal. So I did. Appeal, that is. On tear-stained paper and with a quiver in my handwriting, I explained the misunderstanding and threw myself on the mercy of what by then had become the briefer but no more tractable Swedish Migration Agency.

I was called for interview – locally rather than ambassadorially. There I joined a queue consisting mainly of Somalis, then was summoned to be dealt with separately, and as it turned out more quickly. Like now, rather than in five hours’/ days’ / weeks’ / years’ time.

A few weeks later, I received a letter of approval and an invitation to one of the regular citizenship ceremonies. Followed shortly by a spanking new Swedish passport. I jumped for joy and skipped the ceremony. I mean, I’d been living and working in the country for over ten years.

From which we will hop over a couple of further minor blips to the point of the whole exercise. (Well, OK then. I travelled to Venice on an out-of-date passport and count myself lucky not to have joined the lion’s outside St Mark’s as a trophy of war. Next, I had to surrender my British driving licence when I drove our car into someone else’s garden under the influence. So now, having served my time, I have a Swedish one. Lastly there was the renewal of my passport pursuant to my leaving the old one in the side pocket of my cargo trousers prior to them being laundered in the original sense. There you have it – the full frontal. And I hope you’re satisfied.)

Where was I?

That was it. The irony of it all.

Sweden is still a member of the EU. But as you may have noticed, the UK isn’t.

In the meantime, my British passport lapsed.

Renewing it used to be a piece of cake. Britain once had a harassed but efficient consul in Gothenburg who would take care of the matter. Then the Foreign Office got rid of the consul, so I had to apply through the Embassy in Stockholm. Also no big deal. I could do it by post.

But when the time to renew the document came in 2019, I found that even this tree-lined avenue had been closed to me. Now I would have to apply online and send the passport, along with any required documents (eg birth certificate) by courier to an office in Britain. To boot, I would have to pay a lot more for the renewal, along with the delivery in both directions.

Now, I don’t know about you but when I hear the word courier, an image comes to mind of a leather-clad man (or woman, of course) on a motorbike, armed to the teeth and ready to shake off all pursuers. I suppose I’ve seen too many spy movies.

And when I hear the word birth certificate, I go into existential meltdown as I try to recall where I put it. What’s more, I might also be required to provide a notarised proof of identity, professionally translated.

Add to that, trying to get a digital photo that fits the requirements uploaded electronically is not my idea of life-enhancing entertainment.

I quote:

‘Go to a photo shop or booth that provides photo codes that can be used in UK passport applications.

The code must be in 3 parts. It will contain letters and numbers.

It’s simple to use in your online passport application:

1. you’ll have the option to enter the code to access your photo;
2. after entering the code, you’ll see your photo on the screen;
3. check your photo and submit it;
4. your photo will be added directly to your application.’

Frankly, I see nothing ‘simple’ about that exercise at all.

After undergoing the above ordeal, I could still be called for interview to the embassy in Stockholm. All told, in terms of stress and brass, I figured I could happily survive on my Swedish passport. This, I renew at the local police station, pay about forty quid and can collect within a fortnight. They even take the photo there.

Then it came to pass (all flesh is grass) that Brexit happened and I found myself (minus UK passport) lumped together with the rest of the undesirable Lumpenproletariat that the British regime was trying to keep at a safe distance, ie anyone from anywhere else. In April 2025 all visitors from Sweden or presumably other countries in the EU are required to fill in and submit an ETA, even if you are only in transit. Apparently this doesn’t mean I have to download and 3D print a terrorist fighting for Basque independence. The letters are intended to stand for Electronic Travel Authorisation. The Foreign Office assures us that this is not a visa. ‘You do not need a visa to travel to the United Kingdom from Sweden.’ Since the application for an ETA can be rejected on various grounds (I particularly like ‘not conducive to the public good’), I fail to see the difference between the one and the other.

Needless to say, we will have to transit through Britain in October. So it was best to be prepared and look into this business. It didn’t look promising. One of the quality national papers in Sweden carried an article earlier in the year entitled ‘For your own sake: don’t travel to England.’

Amongst the journalist’s reasons were the fact you had to download an app before you could start filling the (damned) thing in. Then there was the length of the online form, which he claimed consisted of ca 86 steps. But the poor chap had most problems with the photo. See above. More or less the same as for the passport application.

Oh well. I no longer had a Brit passport. So I would have to go for the ETA. I downloaded the app and just hoped that when I was asked to fill in the citizenship box, and confessed I had dual Swedish and British, the app wouldn’t short-circuit. Like ‘Stupid human. Read instructions. ETA not needed for British citizens.’

Well, there was still plenty of time before we were due to leave. I might as well make myself feel better by writing a blog on the subject and sharing my torment with the man in the e-street’. (ie you)

And in the interests of integrity and authenticity, and also because I have very little else to do, I decided to test-run a passport application. It sounded as if it wasn’t much more difficult than the ETA.

I didn’t have to download an app. The questions were (relatively) simple. So far, I haven’t been required to verify my identity. (Just as well, because I’ve always wondered about it.) I didn’t even have to prove I was conducive to the public good.

Then came the photo. Just for fun, I decided to check and see if I had one from a previous application for a visa, to Shangri-La for example. I whacked it in and much to my surprise and gratification, it was accepted. So I went through the rest of application. Once it was completed I was told that I had to send in my expired passport and send it by ‘signed for delivery’ mail to a British address. This turned out to be what is called ‘registered post’ here. So off it went, and I just crossed my fingers that the whole thing hadn’t been an elaborate ploy by some East European mafia to get hold of an obsolete document in hot pursuit of the gang’s plans for world domination.

I’ve now been informed that the Passport Office has received my document and are processing it. So watch this space.

This space

Having received my old passport, the Office then demanded I send my latest Swedish passport as proof of identity. You must be joking, I thought – trust the last proof of who I am to the Swedish postal system? Luckily I could, it seemed, send a photocopy instead.

So happy ending. I’m now the owner of a new passport and a new nervous breakdown.