I phoned the passport office in the UK and they apparently don’t have the facilities to write an email to say that they’ve got my passport and are working on the new one. They are also unable to tell me how long it will take, the new system’s having a paddy so the 4 weeks on the website is more like 8 weeks in real life. And counting.

Obviously they aren’t allowed to go through the process in the wrong order. Speeding mine up is unthinkable.

The third person didn’t have any more/better ideas than the other two about how to work the system and get me employed before my passport gets here, so it looks like I’m unemployed* until about July…

But hey, who wants to work through the summer anyway??!

* that’s not strictly true. I still have my other part time placement. 🙂