British

T. and I had our citizenship ceremony this week, which marked the last step in the process of becoming naturalised British citizens.1 Signing something, in style Overall, this was a pretty straightforward and streamlined process. The EU Settlement Scheme had just become available when we got married, and we pretty much rode that train to citizenship: we waited for settled status, then another year, then applied, and six months later we received the email notifying us of the favourable outcome. I think the National Insurance Number system and the digital records tied to it played a major part in making this straightforward: we didn’t need to supply proof of employment, proof of tax payment, etc., as this was all already in the system. As a result, the application process was not complex, and only presented a couple of annoyances: We needed to submit scans of every page of our passports (even the empty ones). This took a while to put together. We needed to provide the dates of every…