As I imagine is quite normal behaviour for a 19-year-old, my son lost his passport (he was going to Turkey at the end of the month during which it disappeared) and, in the search for it, his bedroom was given a much-deserved turning-over. One of the things he found was a pair of his dear departed Grandad’s glasses (a souvenir from a previous visit)!

Anyway, after much swearing and grunting, all hopes of retrieving it were abandoned. After he had gone out one day, he telephoned me, saying he thought it might be in the glove-box of his old car, which had died and was rotting in our drive in pre-scrap mode. So, I duly opened the car and, in the course of the several minutes of ferreting about in the front, back and boot, I found the following: 90p in small denomination coins, nothing higher than a 20p, several pieces of what appear to be homework from the school he had left the previous year, one of that school’s text-books, my golf clubs (I thought they were in the garage), a sleeping bag, a Nintendo game that he had been trying to find for some months (it was in the sleeping bag), assorted small objects which I decided I didn’t want to touch, and no passport. I kept the 90p.

We (meaning I, of course) duly lodged a formal lost passport report via the Passport Office website. Needless to say, the passport turned up a couple of days later; the application for renewal could therefore be made. Except we couldn’t find the form which had been received a few days earlier and so had to order another, which we (I, again) did via the Passport Office website. Having received and completed that one, it was despatched with the existing passport. As you may have guessed by now, the previously received application form was found (behind a pile of junk on the landing); I tore it up. Two phone calls from Evening Team 6 at the Passport Office, two letters to Evening Team 6 explaining (1) that the lost passport had been found and (2) that the passport had been lost in the house and that it had not been out of my son’s possession (and a week or so) later, a new passport arrived.

MI6 have probably got a file on me now.