It’s been a white-knuckle ride, but we’re finally off to France subject to our Covid ‘declaration of honour’
Like many people, I’ve spent a lot of this year playing the great new game of holiday roulette, a wild ride that began for me in January, when a group of us, convinced that foreign travel would be possible again by the summer, booked a house in rural France. So many times, we almost cancelled. So many times, I wondered if our nerve would hold. On Thursday, however, our uncommon steeliness/wilful stupidity paid off. France returned to the amber list. Time for the casino to pay up.
Only then a new game began: the struggle to organise all the stuff you now need to cross international borders. The French government’s requirement that travellers sign a “declaration of honour” promising they have no Covid symptoms makes me laugh; it reminds me, somehow, of the notes small children write, in which they sombrely announce to their parents that they’ll “tidie my bedroom soon” or do their homework “if I can have a Nintendo Switch”. But the business of booking Covid tests is the opposite of funny. While there are hundreds of “government-approved” companies out there, it seems that many turn out to be strangely uncontactable when their kits fail to turn up. In the end, I went with the site with the most vaguely scientific-sounding name and was duly rewarded with a surprisingly warm email from “Dr Tom Stubbs and the Chronomics team”. Fingers (and test tubes) crossed.