[TLSContact]

A reflection on capitulating to things you find abhorrent

The UK visa offices in Ireland occupy a set of indescribably drab and cruelly-lit office buildings in a northern suburb of Dublin already being gentrified before it was ever occupied by actual people. A few weeks before entering Cambridge, I had taken a bus — or was it two? — from Killiney to Pearse Station, and another north from there on a journey that ultimately took hours. As my bus passed the British embassy I could see flowers heaped at the gate for the late English queen, incongruous and obscene in an Irish capital.

The UK Home Office was evidently so gutted by decades of budget cuts that the only portion of the visa application process it actually conducted was the actual granting of the visa. Everything else — verifying documents, collecting paperwork, harvesting fingerprints — was outsourced to a corporation calling itself TLSContact. For this corporation I had already stared into a camera that took photographs of my retinas, already laid my hands on a fingerprint scanner someone cleaned cursorily with a disposable wipe — an abnegation of my body to the British state I still regret deeply. Now I was making the long trip again to pick up my visa, assured by TLSContact’s website that the office was open until four in the afternoon.

I had received an email that day from Cambridge, proudly explaining that they had officially investigated the university’s historical connection to the slave trade. Yes, said Cambridge, we had profited from slavery, we took slaveowners’ money, trained their sons, built monuments in their honour. Now we are sorry. It occurred to me only later that a historical investigation into slavery was entirely superfluous: Cambridge is still taking slavers’ money, only these slaveowners are not white Anglo-Saxons but Emirati oil princes. The email made me angry in a way I could scarcely express. This was the first time I felt that Cambridge special: the cold terror of my actions becoming incompatible with my values.

I arrive at the TLSContact offices rain-drenched and tired. It is not yet four. The offices are open but a guard refuses to let me enter. Pick-up time, he tells me, ends at half-three, not four — a qualification posted nowhere on their website. They wouldn’t let me claim my passport. As I left the office my fury was a palpable thing, corroding my body because it had no place to go. I felt impotent, subservient to forces I could not control. I could not even obtain catharsis through fantasies of an instinctual, flailing rage. Could I yell something cruel at an underpaid guard? Burn this hollow industrial park in suburban Dublin? No: I would travel another four hours the next day and meekly pay their €35 “collection fee.” There was no other way to reclaim my own passport.

This was a trivial incident: in ten years I will scarcely remember how venal and greedy the UK visa application process was. Yet it was a watershed moment for me, the day I learned to capitulate to the brute weight of forces that were not so much evil but inane, stupid, and banal. 

In the nine months I would spend in the UK I grew to be intimate with this feeling. The country is an agglomeration of systems that have long since become useless, if not actively detrimental, to anything human. That same gut-punch would hit over and over again. The idea is to grind you down into acceptance.

Nothing, however, was as sickening as that loss of moral credibility that struck reading the email on slavery. I knew that I would not, could not, turn down Cambridge. I would scrape and save to get in, take funds from whoever I could, live in debt for a decade or two just to append that beautiful name to my CV. Tyler Lynch, educated at the University of Cambridge. 

I wandered that remote industrial park in north Dublin in an utterly calm fury. I was angry because I felt that all this work — the thousand pounds I was spending on my visa, rushed passport, and healthcare fees — was somehow rendered hollow and worthless by those four hundred years of slavery. It felt like I’d be branded by everything ugly that went before me. As if I’d fought for years to enter the locus of everything I loathed.

So in a fantasy of childish rebellion, I vowed not to smile in my university photos. I would claim this one, petty act of defiance.

Three weeks later, I did that. In the class photo for the 2023 cohort of the MPhil in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, you will see me standing in the front row in my father’s borrowed suit, too short in the sleeves and too narrow in the shoulders. I am staring into the camera in a feeble, impotent act of protest. I am not smiling.