The Lone Father, in which I expose myself to legal types.

The hour of Fiddy’s surgery approaches and my thoughts are now turning to other areas of preparation for the trip. Documentation.

The list is headed by the usual suspects of passport (note to self: Get a passport!), Fiddy’s logbook, an International Drivers Permit, a Green Card and similar odds and sods. I also need some documentation from the PCLA. “What?” I hear you ask?

If you’d not already picked up from earlier in this blog, my wife has eschewed my epic road trip in favour of a week or two on a beach, leaving me as an effective single parent to one times son, one times stepdaughter and one times stepson. A visit to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website revealed that, in addition to the aforementioned odds and soddery, I need to be ready to prove that I have permission to be travelling with the kids but, although the FCO is part of the Civil Service, the civility of their service did not extend to any form of enlightenment as to what precisely would be required. Instead I was advised to talk to the relevant embassies for enlightenment.

This is where the Parent and Child Licensing Authority come in. Simply get a V5 for each child and Bob’s your uncle. The problem is that there is no such useful body as the PCLA. You can bet your granny that the government would document the crap out of parents and children if there was any tax money in it but there’s not. This is why it’s easier to export a child than a car. Unless, that is, if you to go to the supposedly dark corner of Europe that is the Balkans, where our former communist chums seem to be leading the way in closing the conduits through which children can be smuggled away from their legal guardians.

So, back to the business at hand, and several days of trying to make contact with the embassies of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Albania resulted in no response of any kind from the former Yugoslavians and a hugely enthusiastic but worryingly simple response from the Albanians. That’s not to say the Albanian Embassy didn’t help, rather that their “I’m sure a letter will do.” left me thinking “But what if it won’t?”. The next tack was to contact the British Embassies in these countries, explain my predicament and see what they had to say on the matter.

After several days of patient waiting, an email arrived from a person signing themselves of as ‘Consular Section’. Consular Section seems to work at the British Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia. Their suggestion was a pimped version of the Albanian letter, with the added bling of notarisation. That sounded good, if, as is inevitable when exposing one’s self to legal types, expensive.

Armed with a need for a Notary Public I headed back to the web to ask Google’s opinion and before you could say “That was rather quick” was talking to a Notary Public. They suggested adding even more bling to the notarised letter by registering with the FCO to “facilitate the verification of its veracity”. And all this for £45 + VAT. At that price I may make a habit of exposing myself to legal types.