Passports = Pain (in the) ASS - PORTS
Why? Well, they are the one thing that cost you a fortune to buy, you usually look too sad, too happy, thug like, or bored in the photo, and it’s something you desperately don’t want to lose.

So what do you do as soon as you get home from holiday – put them somewhere ‘safe, where you won’t forget where it is, for your next trip’. Or if you lived in an organized house you would probably file them away under P for passports, or T for travel. But not so in my family. We hide ours.

We don’t just hide ours, then find them easily. We hide ours, then have a mass ‘family treasure hunt’. Where we spend a dedicated chunk of an evening searching high and low for them. Usually in ridiculous places, including under the fridge and my dad’s sock draw. That’s what we did last night. We put all our plans on hold to search the family home for them. It was quite fun for the first minute, but then I just got frustrated – why couldn’t we just have put them in the filing cabinets with everything else?

My dad likes to think if we put them in the filing cabinets, if our house got broken into, they would be able to find them easily – but I argue that if they had already entered our house, they obviously know where we live, and unless these thieves look identical to us, they aren’t really any use to them anyway!

I think my mum likes to ‘hide them’ really well, and secretly knows exactly where they are – but uses this as an excuse to get her children and husband to ‘spring clean’ whilst we are at it. It’s amazing how it just ‘might happen to be in the laundry cupboard, so you may as well get rid of any junk while you are there!’ works every time.

My sister, well she is like mum’s slave and she loves cleaning, so she just gets in there and does it. Me on the other hand, well I’m a bit over the ‘we’ll time you’ or the ‘I’ll give you a treat if you find it’ games. After every family holiday, I try to sneak my passports back, and look after it myself, so we don’t have to go through this ‘game’ again, but mum has usually already hidden them before I can have a say.

After two hours of hunting, I thought I had struck gold and we would be able to stop pretending to be gold prospectors or pirates and go to bed. But no, I had found the protective covers that your passport comes in, but no passport. Great. I figured this was my cue to leave, I had come one step closer to finding them – but hadn’t struck gold yet. So I went home. Apparently the search went late into the night, as my sister kept having ‘light bulb’ moments, only to end nothing.

So, if you are planning on hiding your passports, make sure you tell someone where you put them, or keep a note somewhere. Or just be like most normal people – file them away. It will save you many hours of your life, of family ‘bonding’ and of disappointment, when you think you’ve found them, but you haven’t.