A few weeks ago I renewed my passport, partly to avoid the early stages of the National ID database, partly to avoid the price increase associated with it and partly because I only had nine months left to run on mine. In other words the time had come. And a few days ago so did my shiny new passport! It has snazzy biometric data that immigration officials can use to determine if my eyes are indeed blue and stuff. I have been profiled to the standards the US government needs to determine if I am a terrorist - which actually just reeks of being a rather pointless exercise but my rants on the futility of poorly implmented security can wait for another day.

All this passport stuff has had me thinking. As I flipped through my old passport I came to realise it actually meant something to me. Most of the marks and stamps in there mean something to me, in fact some of them are reminders of some major aspects of my life. My passport has been my travelling companion. It's been from Vancouver to San Diego to Paris to Prague and it's the only constant I've had on all of my trips. Now, it's officially useless.

As I put my old companion beside it's shiny new replacement I realise just how battered it had become. Each imperfection a testament to some adventure in my life. It's silly but that booklet means something to me even if the governments of the world regard it as trash. A new passport almost signals a new era of my life; no more additions to the old book consign it to history. From here on in my travels are new, or maybe they're worse than new; they're distanced from those days of exploration and discovery, that's a previous chapter, a time gone by. Now I am not walking fresh ground, I've walked the carpets in airport longues too many times and the new passport chases the memories of my youth and hammers home the passing of time.