Why you need a moustache

I'm forty-nine years old. You'd expect me to have learned a thing or two about life by now and I'd like to think I have although perhaps not so much as I ought.

One of the things I've learned is that if you have a lot of things to remember, then that can be quite stressful and one way to take care of that is to make a list. It might be a list on a piece of paper or on your phone or on something as useful as Wunderlist, it doesn't really matter.

Once you have your list, you can start to prioritise. You can think about the difference between urgent and important, and how you need to tackle those things that are both. You can discover that tackling lots of small jobs can be very satisfying and make your list reassuringly shorter. And you might use techniques to defeat procrastination, like breaking jobs you don't want to start down into smaller jobs, like collecting a form from the Post Office.

Today I tackled two important jobs which were both - for different reasons - becoming urgent. The first was to update the address on my driving licence. Recklessly, I opted to attempt this using the DVLA website, having forgotten that all of the government's websites make my head throb and put nearby web-enabled hardware at risk. Fortunately, I had previously picked up the relevant form from the Post Office (see above), so I did it the old-fashioned way and decided, while I was at it, that I'd update my photo, too.

I'm a bit sad to see the back of the drug baron photo with its attendant moustache; it's amazing what a difference it makes when it's gone. I assume this is how Lord Lucan and many people on the witness protection scheme have disappeared from sight. So there's another life lesson; if you need to disappear, sport a moustache for a while beforehand. And buy a razor.

The other job I did today was to extend my passport, for the outrageous sum of £82.50, which included £10 for the man behind the counter to point out that I hadn't filled in the date in the section that described itself as pertaining to people sorting out a passport for a child. I was going to mention that to him but we'd been getting on pretty well up until then and I didn't want to reveal my true colours to him, especially as I no longer have a moustache to shave off if I wanted to go back another time without being recognised.

Somewhere along the way on one of my blogs I think I've had a little rant about how we shouldn't have to pay for our passports: they ought to be granted to any citizen of this country who pays their taxes. But our governments - left and right - love to charge us for things that we've already paid for. And do you think we'll pay less tax once the NHS in in private hands and we're no longer supporting it? Of course not. We pay again for things we've already bought and carry on paying for things that no longer belong to us. And yet Tony Blair can't understand why people support Corbyn. Idiot.

Last lesson: stop writing your blog posts before they get ranty.