Busaholic
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 7 Jun 2014
- Messages
- 14,096
Only just come to this thread, but passports and the photographs on them have a special interest for me, and I'll tell you why. In 1974 my wife and I paid a visit to Soviet Russia, at a time when Cold War tensions were extremely high. We both had visas on top of our U.K. ten-year passports. My passport was brand new and showed me with beard and fur hat, both newly acquired: my wife's was six months from expiry, and showed her as a 14 year old, whereas she'd just had her 24th birthday. Ever gallant, I went through the entry process first; one gate, four heavily uniformed officials, a mere formality. Once through, I stood and watched my wife present her passport to the same officials, one taking it from her, looking first at the photo, then at her, then back at the photo, seemingly ad infinitum. All this without a word, then passing the passport to a second official, with the same ensuing result, then to the third, etc. All the while my wife remained icy cool and unblinking, with me thinking 'here I am in a VERY foreign country I've not visited before and my wife is going to be denied entry: what the hell happens now?' Luckily, after what seemed years but was probably more like five minutes. but the longest five minutes she or I have ever experienced, the officials exchanged some jocular comments and she was let in. Incidentally, on several different foreign jaunts both before and after that, and when she had a more up-to-date passport, I always got waved through and she was often stopped. It got to be a bit of a joke between us. So passport likenesses have always struck me as a hit-or-miss affair.