So, first visit to France since lockdown, and it is reassuringly normal. Cafés and restaurants are quiet, and almost everyone is wearing a mask. Rather charmingly, the signs outside the Intermarché supermarket in the nearby town say Venez Tous Masqués - rather as if they were holding a formal masked ball...
We visit a small village where at the busiest of times we see about two people, so isolation isn't a problem. Perhaps in Antibes there are crowds of people thronging the beaches (this is France in the summer holidays after all). But not in La France Profonde. It doesn't get much deeper than our village.
The British Government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that on our return to plague-stricken Blighty we need to quarantine ourselves for two weeks. Frankly, that's a minor irritation - we were doing that anyway, pretty much.
An email arrives:
You are not allowed to cross unless you have completed the online form available here
It is important that you have the registration number provided after completion of the form with you when you arrive at our terminal in France.
Well, I fill in the form. It isn't onerous, but it's a bit vexing that I have to do a separate form for everyone in the family, and there is no way of copying it. I tell them to contact me by SMS as we have lousy phone reception in the UK (we live in a valley)
Do they contact me by SMS? Of course they don't. They telephone me and leave a message on my voicemail. However, there is no way to return their call. They phone me three times in all, and the last time they tell me they will send an SMS. The SMS arrives to ask me if I am self isolating. Yes, I reply, resisting the urge to apply emphatic invective.
Two days later a police officer arrives at the back door to ask if we are self-isolating. Rather a waste of police time, I suspect. The copper looks at his mobile phone and sees that what a surprise, there is no signal.
It doesn't convince me that the British government knows what it is doing.
