Last week I had to renew my passport. Of course this wasn’t a difficult process in itself - I hadn’t lost or damaged my old one so therefore my form filling was kept to a minimum. Also I’m over 16 (just) so I didn’t have to find a friendly policeman or professional grown up to sign my photo to verify that I was who I said I was.

But, it was the taking of said photograph which really caused me some concern. I had to make sure that I had it taken on a day where my hair looked OK and I had full make up on, because although I’m not a particularly vain person (anyone seeing me rambling round Ealing will attest to that), this photo was going to be with me for the next 10 years and I really wanted it to be better than my last one.

You see the last one was taken when I really wasn’t having a very good day at all. My then husband and I were going to Barcelona for the weekend with a group of friends, but it was only when I was packing the day before that I actually looked at my passport and discovered it was out of date by several months. I’m sure you can imagine not only the expletives filling the room but also the oh-so-joyful experience that was sharing this piece of news with my husband.

Luckily I somehow managed to get an appointment at Petit France the next day and convinced my husband to miss the flight with me (still not sure how I managed that). But suffice to say tempers were somewhat frayed and not helped by the knowledge that, at the point of having my photo taken, our friends were already sitting in a sun drenched Spanish square eating paella and drinking beer.

The resulting photo made me look, well let’s just say, rather testy. My face in an aggravated grimace. Added to the fact that I had still not lost any of my baby weight and for some reason had decided that blond highlights were a good idea, this has not been a photo that I have been proud to show at airports the world over for the last decade. By the way, we did make it to Barcelona – just the 15 hours or so late.

So you can imagine that I was keen to get this new photo just right, however unbeknownst to me things have changed in the last 10 years. Nowadays, absolutely no smiling is allowed, not even a raise of an eyebrow and curl of a lip. But even worse, your hair has to be scraped back off your face. All that time spent coiffing that morning was a complete waste of time and with the very strong flash used on the camera my make up was obliterated too. So the photo of me, which will sadly be with me for the next 10 years, actually looks like I might have died recently. (But the man in Snappy Snaps said it was fine and I didn’t want to cause a fuss.)

It’s very weird knowing that I’m going to use this new passport for the next 10 years. So much has happened in my life since I renewed it a decade ago and it makes me wonder where in the world the new passport might take me, and with whom. What I do know is that when I’m 58 and renewing it next time, I’ll probably look at my 48 year old self and think the photograph isn’t really all that bad after all!

NOTE TO SELF: Take pleasure in the fact that even the most beautiful people have to look awful

in their passport photos.