Passport Control?

Hurtling at two hundred miles an hour from Zurich to Paris on the TGV recently, someone suggested that our passports may be required for inspection as we crossed the border into an EU member country; so we put them together on the table.

Our passports were not needed, so we picked them up ready for inspection at Paris Gar du Nord before catching the Eurostar to London.

I walked up to passport control at Gar du Nord, standing gazing at the camera whilst placing ‘my’ passport for examination in the mandatory way. After a ponderous wait, I was rejected for person to person examination the old fashioned way.

My companions and I were allowed to board, eventually arriving home in England.

A week later came a telephone call from my travelling companions asking if I had the correct passport. I looked, and imagine my utter amazement, I didn’t!

Quickly putting that right, I realised that I had come back home on someone else’s’ passport. If I had managed this then surely it begs the question how many others might either purposefully or unintentionally enter the UK in a similar way?

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