Passports and Mastercard

R. agrees that the passport photos taken last week are not acceptable, and I shouldn't be condemned to be identified as a drowned sheepdog for the next decade. On attending the one local photographer nominated by instructions, it had been a year since my last haircut and also raining. Not a good look.

The passport photo criteria are much stricter than for a British passport- different format (in inches, not cm), looking straight ahead with face exposed, and no smiling.


The saga of the IKEA/Mastercard refund continues. I'd been assured that a fat cheque would arrive after 14 working days (3 working weeks) of request, made last month, but it didn't arrive on Friday as promised. I'm ashamed to say that I made a restrained but voluble complaint to the poor call-centre worker I was connected to, asking why Mastercard can charge my account within 24 hrs of a purchase, but can't manage to deliver a legitimate credit refund within their own slack time parameters.

The world of banking and finance, as far as I understand it, involves the transfer of electrons representing packets of monetary value. Obviously, I have failed to understand that some electrons are very, very slow, and some others very, very fast.