Poles becoming British subjects

I have to agree with that one. On the very rare occasions I have to be at Długa 5, I always enjoy the spectacle of the Polonianists having to wait ages to get documents together with a million Vietnamese - sorry exaggerating here - and getting indignant , while I sail through the EU section in let's say 15 minutes?

Schadenfreude big time :)

I have arrived into Manchester Airport from Emirates Dubai flight a few times in the past few years. Every time i've felt like i was Mumbai or Delhi when i was in the UK/EU passport holders only Queue

Seeing non Irish people with Irish passports breaks my heart. Its ruined many a trip for me. Completely irrational, I know.

My Polish wife swore allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen a few years back because it was cheaper at the time to take out UK citizenship and get a UK passport than to get a Polish passport renewed at the Polish Consulate in London.

What a bunch of useless wasters they were at the Consulate when we sought advice on emigrating/returning to Poland with our accumulated marital junk plus car. We followed their advice to the letter and got threatened with arrest on arrival at the Polish border. What's more, seeing as we had sold our house in England I had no "registered address" which in their eyes meant I had no residence status in the UK (not joking) ... which left political asylum (!!) as the only avenue left for me to emigrate to Poland. Fortunately, the consular official said all this without removing my application from the desk. I picked it up, she grabbed it, but I pulled harder and came back the following day to a different person with a different story. I still absurdly get asked by Polish bureaucrats for my address in the UK. I don't bother telling them the truth. It's at my late father's sold house.

It is now cheaper to buy a plane ticket and fly back to the UK to get a new passport via the IPS' "Premium one-day service" than to get a British passport done while living in Poland via a UK consulate (and there's the added benefit of not being illegal in Poland for at least four weeks).

It's not even done in Warsaw anymore, but all centralised in Dusseldorf. The old motto of 'don't bother the embassy' seems even stronger now.

(meanwhile, I dropped into the American consulate in Poznan for some business - okay, the woman working there was incompetent, but there was no 'guarded to the teeth' security, open visiting hours (unlike the British one where you're basically unwelcome) and all the information I needed was available in some form)

And the new UK compound cost GBP 60 million!

Oh yes. I had a very enjoyable trip there, starting with the non-English speaking security guards, the waiting around for someone to actually show up at the window, and most of all, the extraction of over 600zl for a piece of paper that they could just issue on the spot should they so wish.

They've got to pay for it somehow