The picturesque passport city of Durham

FOR football fans following their team to away fixtures, the old advice was always to get to the station and then simply follow the crowds.

If you get off at Durham, a similar tactic will lead you to the UK passport office.

So I found, at least, when making a six-hour round trip to the scenic cathedral city this week.

After lives were put on pause, thousands of people simply didn’t bother to renew their passport during the Covid lockdowns and the service is now combing through a hefty backlog of applications.

Even a perfectly filled out application can take nearly three months to process.

Dear readers, in the case of needing one for urgent travel, the old practice of heading to the passport office in Victoria and sitting it out for a day should not be relied on.

My own experience found that online bookings for appoint­ments are generally only throwing up slots in Newport, Belfast… and Durham, 280 miles from here.

I won’t be a drama queen and say that’s almost as far as you can get without a passport, but it’s a fair old clip.

Of course, it was all my own fault for not being organised during those Covid months, albeit I can’t have been the only one at that miserable time who might have imagined never being able to break out of the UK again.

There are also longer waits for driving licences and other pandemic put-offs.

My case isn’t helped by the fact my old iconic claret passport had been chomped by Harrington’s canine lodger.

But still, it was a bizarre experience to get the 9.30am train from King’s Cross to Durham, have a quick squiz at the charming old buildings – not a Pret A  Manger in sight – and then spend little more than 10 minutes speaking to an administrator.

All done, then it was back on the train and home in time for dinner – in the same time, I guess, you might have spent sitting in the queue and refusing to leave at the Victoria passport office back in the day.

Nobody up in Durham seemed at all surprised I had travelled so far. In the queue, I chatted with a woman who had come from Liverpool. Another had arrived via two trains from Norwich (you change at Peterborough).

I was trumped by someone who had made a pilgrimage from somewhere in Devon I’d never heard of and with a confusing reason as to why he had not gone to Newport.

All in all, quite the jamboree: a collection of people who leave stuff to the last minute gathered together by the picturesque riverside in the sunshine talking about the cost of rail fares.