On some days I feel old and useless, and last Thursday was one of them. Adrift in the choppy seas of passport application early on, I later experienced further grief with a journey to my out-of-town dentist prolonged by my foolishness in boarding entirely the wrong bus. This forced me into a five-mile ride through the Oxfordshire countryside before I was able to get off and return to start again The day began badly when I was woken up, before I wanted to be, by a nuisance telephone call at 7am. Radio 4’s Today programme reported on Monday that these unwanted intrusions into people’s lives are now running at the rate of one billion a year in the UK. I am getting more than my fair share, with some coming, to my fury, in the middle of the night.

Unable to go back to sleep, I resolved to rise and use the time gained to fill in a passport application. I had been limbering up for this task over some days, reading the pages of notes in an information booklet and bracing myself to put pen to paper.

That’s black ballpoint pen, by the way, and its markings — in capitals only — must on no account stray beyond the confines of the box designated for each number or letter. Trouble is, it is hard to see exactly what these confines are, owing to HM Passport Office’s choice for the form of pink print on pink paper. The energy-saving light bulbs we are now obliged to use — dim as Toc H lamps — don’t help.

So intimidating did all the rules and requirements prove — and there are far too many to be listed here — that I was frightened into a mistake almost at once and started to write the address of a house I left seven or eight years ago.

It’s three strikes and you’re out where errors on this form are concerned. So when I next carefully printed out ‘Oxford’ — sorry, ‘OXFORD’ — on the line above the one reserved for ‘town or city’, I decided this was all too much of a challenge. The final blow was an infuriating lack of information in the instructions about where to put the ‘Osney Island’ part of my address. Should it be immediately after the house number and street name, or on the long, empty line beneath?

I decided this was a matter best left to the Post Office and its Check and Send system for passport applications. This is how to get it right, it seems; but even so — in this quagmire of uncertainty — the service is not infallible. According to the Government website it can only “reduce the chances of your passport application being rejected”.

With an appointment that afternoon at my dentist in Witney, I judged it wise to go a bit ahead of time and do the job there. The ‘bit’ turned out to be an hour — and just as well, for instead of boarding an S1 bus for Witney, I stepped on to a 66 towards Faringdon and only realised my mistake when the vehicle turned right by McDonald’s at Botley.

Daft or what? In my defence I can only say that the information panel at the bus stop was announcing the S1 for half an hour before the identically liveried (and unannounced) 66 appeared. Its front end was obscured behind a Park and Ride 400 all the way from Osney Bridge and when I rushed to flag it down (it wasn’t going to stop) my mind was far from being on its destination board. As a bus pass user, I did not, of course, specify my destination on boarding, as anyone buying a ticket would have done, thereby revealing the mistake.

At Besselsleigh — first stop! — I was fortunate in catching an X30 back to Botley at once. Twenty minutes later, I was on an S1 and reached Witney in time for the dentist and the Post Office (now in WH Smith’s) where a helpful staff member made the business of passport application seem a simple matter indeed. Check and Send was cash well spent.