Dear Big Brother,

Very exciting things are planned for this year, one of which is that my Mum and Dad are taking my brother and I, our respective spice (spouses?), and my niece to Asia for a week's holiday. My sister-in-law is originally from Malaysia, so they're sticking around to catch up with her family and friends and we're going to add an extra week to our trip. I'm looking forward to it immensely.

One of the essential jobs to do was to put in our passport applications. Mine had been in my maiden name and expired years ago, and my Beloved has never had one, so I've been collecting his birth certificate, a registered marriage certificate and the photos we needed, got all the paperwork filled out and found a guarantor. Then we waited til my Beloved was on holidays and went last Monday to have our interview and lodge them. Exciting.

They say to expect it to take 7 weeks. That's fine, we've plenty of time.

You can imagine my surprise to receive an email last Thursday (i.e. three days later) to say that my Beloved's passport had been processed and was being sent via registered mail. I didn't think that Snail Mail could have got the application forms to Canberra in that amount of time! And Monday the postie rang the doorbell to get my signature to recieve one passport. It took a week. Howzat!?!*

So, my Beloved is definitely going on the family holiday.

Now, I was expecting to wait seven weeks to get our passports. I was happy to wait seven weeks to get out passports. The only problem now is that my Beloved has his that was lodged at the same place, on the same date, at the same time as mine.

The photos were taken at the same place by the same bloke, so surely if the Aussie government accepts his pic, mine should be fine too. (although I won't be able to explain to them the flat straight hair phenomenon whereby they don't need to take off very much hair to get to where my skull actually is - the photo is not too small).

I would have thought mine would be easier given the fact I've previously held a passport.

I'm just hoping that the chance that they've found my post about having an assassination list when I was at college is...

Approximately None!

I swear I didn't mean it. I wouldn't ever really do that!

*For my US readers 'Howzat!' is a jubilant exclamation and appeal to the umpire in cricket when you think you've just got a member of the opposing team out. In this case I'm jubilantly appealing to you, my readers, to compliment my government on extraordinarily efficient processing.