Bureaucracy and the Brit

Living in England can often feel like reading Kafka in the dark, hungover, with a fat man sitting on your head. That sensation, to some extent, arises whenever and wherever on earth you have to deal with the unavoidable drag of bureaucracy. But in England, the dark is darker, the ale more regurgitable, the man fatter, and the Kafka Kafker. Get ready for some virtual bureau-tourism: travel writing that helps YOU decide never to bother.

So long are the talons of British bureaucracy that I first felt the pinch back when applying for Cambridge the first time, November '07. It was a wonderful spring, mild and clear; the children were frolicking outside with their hopskotches and skipping ropes, but I could not join in. No, I had to fill out an excessively long online application form, nor was that the end of it. Transcripts, research proposals, CV's, degree certificates all had to be sent in the flesh, by snail mail. To saving trees and fuel costs, Cambridge said no. Next came the icing: references. One of my referees happened to be overseas, which, one might think, wouldn't be too wacky a situation. I had to print off a form, fill out my part, send it to her in the U.K., then she would send it back to Australia, then I would send it back to the U.K., with the impression of Her Majesty's Mailroom still vivid in the little envelope's well-travelled memory. Efficiency with a capital Ef. Effing Cambridge.

English Bureaucracy is a voracious animal however, and its appetite for paper is never quite satisfied. At the moment I'm filling out exactly the same application, a funny piece of absurdist deja vu - or it would be, in play form. I didn't lie, I am actually studying here. But in order to progress from a Masters to a PhD degree, you have to pen the same thing over again, with the generous provision, this time, that you don't have to submit transcripts (because the forward thinkers at the Board of Graduate Studies kept them) and you only need two references instead of three. Onya, Mr BGS. Keep flicking those crumbs my way and I'll keep picking them up.

The constant paperwork has been a moderate stressfest, given that it calls for attention while other significant paperwork is tugging at your pants and complaining that you never buy it ice-cream anymore. I have had to divert time from my impending essay, but that doesn't really bother me. What pinches me more is the 'big picture' thinking that these tasks enforce, when all I have at the moment is a few very small, very granular pictures. I still don't really know why what I'm doing is important, assuming it is important - and I resent being made to think about it so early in the peace. I've managed to stay happy for 23 years without a big legitimising narrative, delusions of grandeur, or a raison d'etre. So why should I give any of these things to my research? It'll just skulk off disappointed when it realises it has fallen short of redefining scholarship. If I have to formulate delusions, at least give me more than two months to do it in.

But that is my own issue, and one of the few things in this life for which bureaucracy cannot be held accountable. Most dealings with bureaucracy provoke swearing, rather than existential crises. The other week I ordered a new camera online. The box came within a few days, and I was about to launch on the road to happysnapsville, when I realised my own staggering douchehood: I'd ordered the body without the lens. So I checked it could be sent back, obtained the green light, and posted it off. Now, since there was a difference in price between old and new goods ordered, I needed to pay the remaining quid on my cred card. But it didn't work. It took me several holds and transfers on the bank line to work out finally that my card had been frozen because I'd bungled the entry of a password a few days earlier. Secure, yet irritating. Anyway, with the payment processed, I thought it would be smooth seas ahoy. Two weeks went by, distinctly cam-less. In a rare act of consumer aggression, I decided it was high time to give the company a call. They told me the couriers had tried to deliver it three times, but I hadn't been home; so, they had sent it back to the store for holding. Now I'm no nine-to-fiver, but it has always been a fundamental assumption of mine that most adults are out on a weekday, usually working. Sensible deliverers in Australia left notes to combat this sticky problem. Not here, though: they just kept coming, knocking on the door, seeing if I was home to sign off my paid package, and taking it with them on their merry way if I wasn't. Which I wasn't. Apparently it happened about four times before I rang and asked the company why the fook they didn't just call me and arrange a time. Or, even better, leave the package with the custodian, who's employed to receive mail, among other things. The good people at Camera World answered my question with another question: 'Why don't you give the courier company a call?' They gave me the number, another hall of mirrors within an unnavigable labyrinth. The whole process of endless deferral and redirection was becoming too creepy and postmodern for my liking.

Despite my fears, the call to the courier was the money shot. We arranged a time and they came five hours too early; luckily (?) I was in bed, conveniently located at home. There have been more stories of despair just like this though. Applying for council tax exemption (everyone pays an exorbitant amount of tax here to subsidise inadequate recycling services etc.) involved inking out the longest form I've ever seen, and providing photocopies of almost every document with my name on it ever released. Again, like the question which always already seeds another question, and the door that leads to more doors, I was referred to a different department in order to complete the last stage of the application, which involved another application: this time for a National Insurance Number. Another arbitrary number was necessary to reduce the number on another form. I dreamt of terrible deaths by paper: a clerk sticking me in a giant photocopier which was really a high energy radiation machine, making me wait while my form trickled down an endlessly high skyscraper, signed by every level from clouds to ground, a form which approved melting my nipple hairs in a precise order pre-ordained by those invisibles at the top.

The bureaucratic principle of maximum difficulty seems to filter through to other spheres too. I was in a rush to get out the door of our flat the other day, hands fully flustered with laundry. But our door is so heavy that it is impossible to open with individual fingers. You need a total clasp of a strong, prehensile hand to pull it towards you with any success. So you drop everything and devote all being to the labour of the door. Once this obstacle has been conquered, it's just a short walk to the laundry through two more doors which must be opened by code, and then a third door which is even heavier than the first door. Thus are daily tasks made just that little bit more mundane and dreaded. It's no small surprise that this country is famous for limited social mobility when impenetrable barriers clog every passage. England may do many good things, but it doesn't open doors willingly.