With no locum duties yesterday, I went to the Parish Eucharist at St Catherine's with Clare. After lunch, a dozy afternoon, rather missing out on the bright sunshine and clear skies. I walked late in the park, as the sun was going down. I got a few beautiful sunset pictures.
This morning my new passport arrived by courier post while I was visiting the city centre Santander Bank branch, to organise the fee payment for my necessary Spanish police check. An IBAN payment to the Spanish Ministry of the Interior for €3.78 was required for this, a little tricky for the bank clerk to execute, but I came away with a couple of official receipts to send with the application. Best of all, the £15 or £30 charge for the service, due to be abolished in April, was waived by the bank!
It's only ten days since I applied on-line, a third of the time it took to process a paper application a decade ago. A very impressive improvement. I feel very sad however, that the passport no longer says 'European Community' across the top. But at least I have a burgundy coloured one as the proposed dark blue replacement covers aren't yet in use. It least, it'll be possible not to stand out in a Euro border queue.
All I have to do now is fill in the application form and get it in the post. It'll have to wait until tomorrow when I'm fresh. I don't relish having to fill in a form by hand. Writing small to fill in little boxes is something I now find difficult. Even with reading glasses on it's an effort. I would prefer to fill in a form digitally but on-line wasn't an option, and the form is a .pdf.
You need Adobe Acrobat to edit a pdf, which I don't have. It's not free software. There are lots of on-line apps for doing this, claiming to be free, but they aren't. Either they deliver a watermarked copy and you have to pay for a clean one, or you have to 'subscribe' and have your email address spammed. It's easy to make a .pdf format file, but there doesn't seem to be a genuinely free means of editing them.
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