'I just don’t understand the science behind quarantine'
I feel for all those quarantine-busters, though I don’t understand the science: “You’ve got two days to get back!” It’s as if the virus is drumming its heels in some asymptomatic Croatian passer-by, waiting for a signal from Matt Hancock to get to work. “I must remember not to break those cell walls until Tuesday.”
Er… either the holidaymakers are infected, or they are not. Telling them to hurry up and get back quick seems as mad as every other diktat emanating from a panicked Cabinet. Surely it would be better to say, “Stay where you are and be ill, please.”
I wonder about planes too. My “job” depends on good health. In the past, whenever I’ve gone abroad for TV and heard a liquid cough six rows behind me, I’ve known I would soon be sweating and shivering by the baggage carousel.
I’ve even turned down a career high recently to avoid my hypochondria. I was asked to be the victim in Death in Paradise. Was it really worth the 16-hour flights to and from Guadeloupe? (I’d have been travelling at exactly this time, too, with Covid-19 wreaking havoc on international travel.) “Death in Passport Control”, I reckoned.
Mind you, it was only three lines. I’d certainly have risked it if I’d been the murderer.
But that is work. I travel for pleasure too, but should we risk mass tourism during a world-straddling emergency? For some reason, many people do – or am I being too harsh?
My wife thinks I have advanced Antoinetteism – “Let them eat cake”, pontificating from the luxury of my rolling Suffolk acre. “Why can’t these good people go just one year without their villa holiday in the Med?”
“You haven’t been cooped up with three kids in a tower block,” she says.
Well, I have, actually. I grew up in Harlow (though they were my parents’ kids, and it was a terrace). For 16 years, we never even left Essex. My chum Jimpson went to Mundesley in Norfolk and I envied him. I think Horth might have gone hop-picking, whatever that was. Only Miller ever went abroad.
Holidays in the 1960s expanded our anxiety thresholds more than our horizons. Father fretted. We sat in the back of the car for what seemed like days on end (this was before motorways) in a state of mounting excitement, crying, “Who will be the first to see the sea?” as we rolled into the caravan park in Maylandsea – a sort of ditch near Thurrock. The mud. The caravan. It was the 1960s.
But, goodness knows, you don’t need a woolly hat, a baby and a bell tent to do the Brit thing. (My father would have thought all that a little self-indulgently luxurious.)
It’s not that crowded either. Some say the entire population of the world could stand on the Isle of Wight (though they might be prosecuted, of course). There are places in this country that are pleasingly remote, interesting and sometimes dry.
We went to Pembrokeshire. St Davids was thronged, but the smallest city in Britain is easily overrun. Fleeing north, we climbed Carningli. We gazed across empty Wales towards Ceredigion, with nothing but the ghosts of the Iron Age hill fort (who had to climb up there every day) alongside. It was deserted for miles around.
We were utterly alone at the largest Megalithic burial chamber in Wales: the Welsh Stonehenge, Pentre Ifan. We plunged into a magic wood, ancient before that 5,500-year-old monument was even erected, and shared the experience with no one.
And of course, as Mrs Jones will attest, this is how I like it. Why would anybody want to squat on a seal colony-type beach, barge through a thunderous sweaty nightclub or take a lemming-like leap into a self-inflicted fever on an airport bus when there are such nourishing free cakes available?
Speaking of cakes, perhaps my wife is right about my Marie Antoinette syndrome. I accept that some people do like to travel en masse. Off with their heads.
Read more of Griff Rhys Jones’s travel writing here.
