I strongly sympathise with Lord Kinross's suggestion, made in a
letter to The Times this week, that passports should have more pages in them. My current one, like its predecessor, is already double-yolked ; that is to say, it consists of two passports bound together, the earlier of the two being still valid, but its 32 pages having been obliteftted by official hieroglyphs. This makes the passport unnecessarily bulky, and, since it does not expire until 1954, a third volume will have to be incorporated if I do more than the minimum of travelling before then. I suppose one of the reasons why passports get more congested than they used to is that journeys by air often involve several irrelevant transit visas, while particulars relating to currency and sometimes to health are also entered in them. China is—or was when you could go there—particularly wasteful of passport space, since separate entry and exit visas were required for every province. Looking back on the four-times-32 pages which my comings and goings have caused frontier officials and others to deface since in 1923, " We, George Nathaniel . . .." desired all such to let me pass freely without let or hindrance, I note that visas for Eire and for Russia take up more room than any others.
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