Getting a passport today is no easy task.

Not only do you have to stomach the - recently increased - £80-plus price tag, but also keep your fingers crossed it arrives before your holiday. In six months' time.

But not so long ago, things were a little easier.

Anyone who has lived in Kent for a fair few years will remember how a day-trip to France was both cheap and hugely popular.

Fuelled by the chance of buying cheap fags and booze in the ferries' duty-free shops (this was, let us not forget, an era before the Channel Tunnel) taking a trip across the water was big business.

The companies operating between Kent and France (and back then you had the choice of travel from Dover or Folkestone with Boulogne a popular destination) were locked in a battle to provide the biggest and most feature-packed boats to win our custom.

I can remember Sealink's huge Fantasia and Fiesta ferries - which both came with (if I remember correctly) domed dancefloors for those who wanted to party the crossing away, while many didn't even hop-off on the other side - enjoying what were known as 'non-landers'.

These passport-free excursions allowed you to travel on the ferry, not disembark in France, fill up on booze at both the bars and the duty-free shop, and then come home again. An odd night out, looking back at it, but hugely popular.

But with so many of us just wanting a day out, applying for a pricey 10-year passport was often a bit of a step too far. Not to mention making an on-the-spur-of-the-moment jaunt a nigh-on impossibility.

Which is where, in the early 1990s at least, you could snap up a one-month British Excursion Document.

It certainly wasn't a fancy document - just a sheet of A4 folded three ways so it was a flimsy little identification document. But it let you travel to France with a minimum of bureaucratic fuss.

But it was yours for a fraction of the cost.

Crucially, you could go in and get one over the counter at a Post Office - meaning you were saved the will-it-arrive-on-time-or-won't-it panic when applying for a full passport.

Of course, you still needed to get your photograph confirmed by someone before hand, but the biggest delay you faced tended to be simply the size of the queue at the Post Office of your choice.

Mind you, getting your photo taken was a more hit and miss affair.

Before today's more modern photo booths - something which is surely set to go the way of the phone booth given we can all take a passport-suitable image with our phones today and just upload it - the previous incarnation needed a bit more planning.

Rather than getting, as today, the option to OK the image on a screen before it prints out, then you just had to make sure everything was just right and pray the four pictures which emerged were going to pass the passport police's strict requirements.

Getting the giggles or, as was more often the case, having your mates barge in just as the flash went off was only going to cost you another £1.50.

What hasn't changed, of course, is that whenever you get your passport out in public, the image displayed within inevitably proves highly amusing to friends, family and colleagues.