A HUGE backlog of asylum applications is costing the taxpayer £500m. This is because Home Office staff are taking two months to deal with paperwork that should only take nine hours to process.

That does surprise me. Only two months? Are they on a special fast-track system? If only those of us born in Britain who have tried to apply for a passport recently were treated as swiftly.

One of my boys had his application rejected when he was four months old because a bit of my hand was showing from where I was holding him in the photo booth. A baby with a hand growing out of his arm - obviously a classic terrorist disguise.

Then we had to re-do an application for his older brother because the teacher who had signed his form let the bottom of the J in her Christian name go over the border on the signature box by one whole millimetre. Good job they spotted that one otherwise our national security might have been seriously compromised.

Trying to renew four of the children's passports and get a new one for the toddler at the same time a few months ago was an even bigger nightmare. With all the photographs taken and split up with the forms between various teachers and doctors for filling in and signing, I thought I had everything covered.

I even remembered to make sure witnesses didn't make the mistake of saying they knew the children applying for the passport, instead of the parent who had signed the form. (They caught us out with that one before.)

But then the eagle-eyed "checker" at the post office, who looks over applications for mistakes, noticed the first two letters of a name on one form had been written in blue ink before being covered over in black.

I assumed the only reason for using black ink was so it could be photocopied easily, so had simply gone over the blue once I realised my mistake.

But my checker, who looked like Olive from the Seventies TV comedy On The Buses, was having none of it. "It clearly states it must be written in black," she said. Blue ink - no doubt another common terrorist ruse.

I had no option, she said, but to fill in the form again and ask our busy family doctor to do her bit again too. Olive's hang-dog expression almost broke into a grin. This must have been the highlight of her day.

She didn't realise there was even better to come. The birth certificate for one of my sons' applications was a short, rather than a long one because the long one had been stolen from his father's car.

But I rang the Passport Service when it was stolen, three months ago, and was assured the short copy was sufficient to renew his passport, I protested.

How stupid did we think Olive was? She wasn't going to fall for a trick like that. Her eyes narrowed: "It's all been tightened up now. That rule has been changed." When? "About three months ago," she told me triumphantly. "Perhaps you'd like to go to the Register Office and get a new birth certificate."

No, Olive, I wanted to tell her. What I'd like to do is go away and cancel the holiday and bin the blooming passport application forms.

And to think we're just British citizens who want to get out of the country for a few weeks.