Due to laxness on a grand scale I had the need to avail myself of the Home Office Identity & Passport Service‘s premium same-day passport service. Whilst the cost was exorbitant (£108 for the passport, £40 for the train fare, a day’s holiday etc) it was a surprisingly slick operation.
You *do* have to very carefully fill in the application, make sure you have your photo’s taken by a photographer with a home office certified Polaroid camera, have inordinate amounts of verifying identification and something to do during the four hours it takes to process the application, but having organised all of that I don’t think I spent more than 15 minutes in total in the passport office.
So I now have a chipped and machine-readable biometric passport and am part of ‘the system’ once more.