As our departure date loomed, I worried about the results – but it was the soaring prices and small print that sent me into an anxiety spiral
It started next to a caravan at the back of a church. We were going to Morocco – but only if the kids first had negative PCR tests. From a distance, it’s a formality, like checking in online and carefully confirming that you haven’t got a Swiss army knife in your hand luggage. Only when the date loomed up close did the reality kick in that they might actually have Covid and it would be wiser not to get too excited until we had the results.
By then, of course, it was too late. I was already too excited and all that anticipation segued effortlessly into nail-biting dread. My son was also biting his nails, which my daughter hates, but nothing drives her more bananas than when we both do it at the same time. It’s not the biting, apparently, but the melodramatic terror in our eyes. He wasn’t even worrying about the test, he was worried that the testing lady hadn’t got his passport number right and that he would get turned back on a technicality. “She asked me to check it against my passport and I said I had, but I’d only skimmed it.”
