Duty Free

Back in the days when a black British Passport was worth the paper it was printed on, a British citizen was duty-bound to use and fully take up his/her full duty-free allowance when leaving, or at very least when returning to the UK. I think this "conditions of use" was shown in the corner that was sadly cut off when the passport lost it's validity in 1995 and was replaced by one of those ghastly red plastic EU passports that did away with all reference to the UK.

Duty-Free: Oh the joy and anxiety of waiting to get 5 miles out of the harbour or the mad scrum at the airport trying to keep an eye on the departure gate info monitor, while comparing Gilbeys with Gordons and B&H against Dunhill and was it 200 or 400? Perhaps 400 outbound and 200 inbound but what if it was to/from the USA?

Oh so complicated but all part of the joy of a trip to foreign parts. Could never have a holiday or Livingstone-like foreign adventure feeling, if you haven't first done the Duty-Free bit.

Ever since the EU did away with duty-free, the value of having a holiday or being a bold traveller to the European mainland has been lost. And did the EU get the tour operators or ferry companies to reduce their prices to compensate for this? NO NO NO. A rip off again planned by Junckers, Merkel & their non-elected, undemocratic elite.

This photo shows my last round trip air ticket to "Europe": Gatwick-Munich-Gatwick, the standard weekly trip Nogbad and I did to work: 6:30 on Monday morning quickly stocking up on a few packets of Hamlet cigars or whatever smokes one was on. Then the Business Class VIP lounge and one miniature of champagne down the hatch and one in the briefcase for later.

Now that Munich was to become home, I had on the outbound journeys, to buy a bottle of booze to stock up the Munich flat bar. Only after moving to Munich full time the following week, did I discover in the supermarkets that all the duty-free booze I had been buying for weeks and months, was cheaper on the German supermarket shelves! That really spoilt all the fun.

The sooner we take back control of our borders, customs, duty-free shops the better. Let's bring back the value of our British Citizen passports. New passport costs over £100 and we need to get value for money. Time to get those French Gendarmes at Calais doing something rather than just standing there impassively staring at our cars - get them behind a desk and start rubber-stamping our passports.  Neatly please and not putting one stamp over an existing one - clumsy, lot.

PS My current passport runs out on 22 June 2016 - seriously. Today on posting this Blip (21st June 2016) my new EU passport arrived. The bloody cheek that Junkers & Co include, on the inside front cover, a message from the Queen asking people to be nice to me. But worse still he has done away with the rather grand sounding French text in my old Black UK passport :

"Royaume-Uni de Grande-Bretagne et d'Irlande du Nord"

and replaced it with three totally foreign languages that mean nothing to me! Probably Hungarian, Finnish and Luxembourgish.:

"Teyrnas Gyfunol Prydain.........."???????
"Rioghachd...........!?????
"Eireann a Tuath"????????

What I do like though, is that on Pages 18 and 19 there is a map of the London Underground which is really useful. The various coupons for discounts at Bournemouth Pier Theatre or the Star Of India's free pint of beer with a Madras Curry are of little value to me, but a nice thought. Suspect that was Nigel Farage's MEP influence on the Brussels bureaucrats. Who said UKIP was a waste of a vote?