Have you heard the one about the Irish police officers looking for a Mr Prawo Jazdy? Apparently he's accumulated quite a hefty list of traffic offences.

Presented by Mags Korczak.

Now you’d be mistaken for thinking this was some kind of silly joke at the expense of the Irish circulating the internet but as it happens, it’s actually true. It seems that a Mr Prawo Jazdy was thought to be a prolific traffic offender on the Emerald Isle, so prolific, in fact, that on closer inspection it was found that his address changed on every single one of the 50 odd records held on him. And then the groszy dropped...

For those who don’t know, the Polish term for driving licence is "prawo jazdy", a term which wrongly (and ever so comically) had been mistaken on a great number of occasions in Ireland to signify the name of whatever offending Polish driver happened to be stopped.  And how I chuckled when my friend first bought attention to this for it rather reminds me of the time last year I had to collect a parcel from a post office in Warsaw.

Now, if you’ve ever had business to attend to in a Polish post office, you’ll know that this is quite a daunting if not a prolonged affair – like most countries you have to battle the geriatrics who treat the place like a community centre. It took me couple of days to muster up enough courage to proceed- indeed I have the internet to thank for a great many of my modern day correspondences. But on this occasion, I had to abandon my desktop to go collect said package in person.

In order to retrieve my parcel I was obliged to provide some form of ID. It’s the Polish identity card they always ask for but seeing as I’m not a Polish citizen I can’t do that, which I explained to the young man serving me. Confusion and worry started to creep onto his face. But I do offer up my UK driving licence to him, which for lack of any other official form of UK ID, other than the passport, does actually count as valid identification, or in the UK at least.  The young man looking ever more confused, had to seek advice from his colleague at the next counter. I go on to explain that yes, it counts as ID, and there, yep you can see my name and yep there my photo- cue cheesy smile. So my young man accepts it all the while with the same slightly perplexed expression on his face.  In the process of looking for an ID number to confirm receipt of my pick-up, he turns my licence over and proceeds to copy down some numerals situated on the reverse. Now it’s my time to give the frown line between my eyes a little outing because there isn’t an ID number on the back of my license..... is there?

What could be construed as some sort of ID number is to be located on the front of the card and is a 16 digit monstrosity consisting of a completely random collection of letters, numbers and hieroglyphics.

No, no there is no ID number on the back of my driving licence. What is on the reverse are three lines of dates which inform the authorities up to when I’m entitled to drive what class of vehicle. For your information that’s up until 2053. Should anyone else go back to that post office to collect a sign-for item and the post office authorities decide to vet that retriever, they may just find themselves in a similar position as those Irish police officers and pinpoint that number to someone in the future who hasn’t quite been born yet and will never exist.

Really, I don’t quite understand what this confusion is with the driving licenses since most (although hasten to add not all) EU driving licenses take on a very similar format. They’re pink or have pink in them, a large majority of them are the size of a credit card and have a collection of European languages spelling out driving licence as a backdrop. It has driving license written in the local lingo at the top followed by a little blue EU flag with the initials of the country where it was issued. And then a very unbecoming, digitally reproduced photograph underneath. It then has your name, date of birth, when you need to renew your card and who issued it, followed by your ID number, your signature and then your address. And if all this is too difficult to fathom it has this information indexed on the back of the card – just below the vehicle classifications which have now become my ID number in Poland. So whilst they differ slightly from country to country, in most cases it’s the difference between tomato, tomatoe (English and American pronounciation). There’s no excuse for stupidity really.

Hmmm I just wonder what the inspectors on the public transport system will make of my British Library card as a corresponding form of valid photographic ID that I should produce along with my bus pass should they ask...