I lived there for two years. I still need a visa.

I lived in the UK for two years. I still need a visa to go back.

I am applying for a visa for the UK, which is a sentence I did not expect to still be writing. I have been there so many times. I lived there for two years. I cannot just get up and go, and I could not get past that. Why do I have to do this. Why is my passport the way it is.

Mine is Indian. It gets me into 55 countries without a visa, which puts it 82nd out of 199. The British one is 6th. I have known that in a vague way for years. I had never actually looked at the others.

So me being me, I went through all of them. Every ordinary passport, 199 covers, photographed the same way so you can compare them. Then the visa rules, who lets whom in. Then how the booklet even started, and why half of Europe is the same red.

mine, and the one I am applying for.

Once they were all laid out, the cover and the doors turned out to have almost nothing to do with each other. The American passport gets you into 153 countries, which sounds like most of the world until you notice America lets 46 nationalities in. Djibouti is the other way round. Their passport gets you into 45. They let in all 198 of the others.

america, djibouti, singapore.

Singapore is almost even, 163 out and 164 in, which almost nobody else is. The UAE was 62nd in 2006 with 35 destinations. It is second now, with 188, and they did not even change the colour of the cover. Europe went red because of a Tuesday in 1981. It was a Council resolution, not a law. Croatia stayed blue.

I still have to send the form. If you want to see yours, they are all here.

a few of them. 199 on the page.

I make one of these every week. The bigger builds, and the stories that never make the newsletter, live in the Hidden Tab. A few dollars a month.

And if you still haven't tried Long Story Short, our daily word game, today's sentence is a good one.

Which one is yours? Hit reply, I read every one.

Akash

All 199 passports · a sheets.works data drop