I submitted an application for an entry visa to the UK at the end of October through the supposedly new ‘streamlined’ system, which is now in place. By the end of December, I still had not had my passport returned.

After sending a series of increasingly desperate e-mails, I was informed that they could not locate my passport in their system. Eventually it was returned but, in addition to my visa, it included a second visa for a Ukrainian woman.

They must have not known who to return it to!

The other day I went to the British High Commission in Malta to ask if this second visa in my passport could be officially annulled.

In front of me was a woman crying because they had lost her passport and would not help her.

Or they ‘could not’ help her – as the official line goes – because they have outsourced anything to do with visa applications.

So, applicants for a UK entry visa, beware. You may never see your passport again once it falls into the impenetrable swamp of the British system.

Oh, and there is no method of redress, except an e-mail address which really is not an e-mail address. And the application office in Malta (with the generous hours of being open two hours, one Tuesday a month “oh, we don’t know nothing.”

But of course.