Too Late for the Jubilee

But still planning on Fish and Chips.

Two things are at the forefront of my planning as we prepare to finally make a trip from France to Britain: the need, according to Jay Rayner, to eat fish and chips at the seashore, and the honestly rather frightening prospect of driving on the wrong side of the road.

It’s kind of surprising that it has taken us eight months to travel to Susan’s homeland, but now that we’ve considered the logistics we can be glad that we took our time - and can curse the Brexiteers that have made this trip so very complicated.

Passports - we have them so no problem there, and our visas mean that we can get back into France with no problem.

COVID - we’re both vaccinated, and both countries sort of claim to to have dropped restrictions, but we still seem to have found a need to go to government web sites to declare our non-contagious purity. Part of the problem is that given the way that various governments have arguably messed up everything to do with the pandemic, we aren’t inclined to just trust the now unused #Tous Anti-COVID app on our phones to secure us entry.

Ferry or tunnel? Yes, arriving on the deck of a ship has romance, but with P&O firing most of their highly-skilled employees and replacing them with newer, cheaper warm bodies it was less than my first choice. Especially during the first summer in several years when people can actually travel to Europe on holidays. And with roads leading to ferries jammed up with long lines of delayed truckers also trying to get from one place to another. The clincher though was Beatrice the Cat, who would have been forced to sit in the car for five hours with little food and even less of a litter box.

EuroTunnel - instead of five hours on a boat we’ve elected to take Le Shuttle from Calais, under the English Channel, and into England. It’s a 35 minute trip, and cheaper than the ferry. I had some kind of romantic notion of how the trip and the train would be experienced, but it turns out to be more or less exactly like boarding a BC Ferry, except no café, and no restrooms. And you have to sit in your car for the crossing.

From there we’ll drive to Pontypool, in Wales, the birthplace of my most trusted editor and style guide. And for once we’ll have time to actually relax, enjoy the area, go hiking, and fully explore Susan’s etifeddiaeth Gymreig. Or Treftadaeth Cymru depending on which on-line translator you trust.

Beatrice the Cat - thankfully she has her official EU Pet Passport, so she can travel back and forth, probably easier than we can. However we need to get her a rush rabies booster because the vet here mis-translated 06/11/2021 as November 6, 2021 instead of the North American June 11, 2021. Once again, what is it with North America? Everyone else understands Day/Month/Year, so why mess it up?

London! - Yes we’ll be there for a couple of days. With a car. Which means three things: Parking at anything around 45£ a day. Congestion charges that start at around 15£ a day. And your car needs to be certified as being very low-polluting. Because the UK has elected to no longer be attached to the EU, the nice purple sticker on our French windshield isn’t enough.

If we were British residents we would just log into the Transport for London site, register ourselves and our car, and everything would be sorted out. We would pay our various charges in advance to get a better price, and be happy.

Because we’re foreigners, or at least our car is, we instead need to sign up with an outsourced outfit who will “within ten working days” certify that our already Euro 6 level rated Hyundai is safe to pollute the air of inner-city London.

In practical terms when we look at what all of this will cost, and given that while in London we’ll be using transit or walking, we’ll likely find parking outside of town and just take a cab or tube into the hotel. Hopefully…

Dear God Boris Johnson! Please do NOT do anything to irritate the transit workers! Assuming you’re still the Prime Minster two weeks from now.