Covid has kept cross-border families like mine apart, but now the treatment of EU citizens at the UK border makes me wonder when we will be able to meet again
Our weekly calls with my husband’s parents in France are strange, and not just because his brother made them download a gaming app to communicate. It feels like there’s a lag on the line: someone is always playing catch up. First, they were tightly locked down while we were still out and about; later they were playing tarot (an incomprehensible French card game) with friends while we entered our ninth week stuck in huis clos in front of the telly. But whatever our respective R-numbers, one question returns: when can we see each other again?
I could cheerfully live the rest of my life without witnessing more tarot (I was banned from taking part years ago), but I miss my in-laws and sprawling meals in their sunny flat, where my mother-in-law once served a giant pie with the charred heads of small birds poking through the crust (her brother snapped them off and crunched them whole – I could do without a rerun of that). It’s been too long: we miss them; they miss us.
