| My recent-ish experience hit online AND manual road blocks. My driving licence was coming up for renewal early August. So I went to renew it on the DVLA website online. It all went fine until it said they needed a new photo from my current passport. I put in the passport number and the system produced a fatuous "Invalid passport number" blockage. I tried repeatedly over several weeks in June and in the end I gave up and did it on a paper form which I sent off two months ago with my soon to expire driving licence plus a print of my recent passport photo. Result? Nothing. No acknowledgement, despite including an email address, no new licence and in the background are media stories about chaos at the DVLA. Some poor people have had to send passports into their bureaucratic abyss. I could travel OK, but my wife would have to do all the driving, which rules out a road trip we were hoping to do round France and maybe Spain. Or maybe we'll be able to go snorkelling in Egypt after all. No chance - our very illogical central government is still labelling even the safe, remote Red Sea resorts (Sharm, Hurghada and Marsa Alam) as red despite Egypt's Covid deaths and cases being dramatically lower than ours. It's all being very badly handled and our once huge industry for foreign tourists coming here is in ruins. |