Visa

There's nothing like a trip to the Indian Embassy to increase your heart rate on a Friday morning. I've just spent the best part of four hours sitting in a crowded room with about two hundred others, all shoving and getting stressy, all for an A6 greenish sticker in a passport that will allow me to enter the Dairylea shaped country as many times as I wish for the duration of half a year. I knew it was going to be a laborious task and as such had been putting it off for days until the realisation dawned that my passport wasn't going to walk to The Strand on its own.

At one point, a man in a black beanie hat, a bomber jacket and slightly-too-tight jeans that show his fat thighs to be, err, fat, strides confidently up to the counter. I watch him suspiciously. Now, I know that he was behind me in the queue and that there were at least 300 other poor souls before us, and my calculation tells me that I'm not going to get to the counter for at least another two hours. I'm trying not to get cross when the very stressed lady behind the counter realises what he's up to and sends him to "Please sit down sir and wait your turn like everybody else! What makes you so important?" Ahhh... peace and love and harmony.