Bemoaning a bit of summer travel chaos shows how quickly we've forgotten the Covid years
1. Staring at an airport departures board as the listing for your flight – and it does seem to be your flight in particular – comes tagged with the word ' delayed ', in hard red capitals. No other information – what time the plane will be departing, why it is so late, what you are meant to do with three fractious toddlers in the meantime – is being offered.
2. Trying to quell the boiling ocean of rage within when a mumbled non-excuse does finally arrive, and your plane's tardiness is explained away as being due to 'unforeseen technical issues', 'a passenger incident', or, worst of all, 'the late arrival of this aircraft'.
3. Standing in a sweaty arrivals hall with a couple of hundred other people, gazing at a baggage carousel that has been whirling for 12 minutes, without producing a single bag.
4. Waiting in a queue while the one 'consultant' assigned to a major hire-car company's desk in a significant Mediterranean airport on a Saturday evening taps at a computer with all the motivation of a 14-year-old who has been assigned extra summer maths homework.
The booking of the first person in the queue is 'not showing on the system'. There are 17 other people in said queue. At least two of them will be unable to find their driving licence, in spite of having 57 minutes in which to prepare for this crucial moment.
5. Hearing the 'news' that your flight home is also delayed, due to 'industrial action by air-traffic controllers in [insert name of relevant country, but it's probably France ]', 'unusual weather', 'an unexpected number of seagulls' or 'badgers next to the runway'.
I could go on. For all that our summer getaways are meant to be a highlight of the year, they are too often dogged by inconvenience, and the endless issues which occur when millions of travellers are moving around the same popular destinations at the same time.
But I will offer the following statement of consolation: However attritional your journey to the Costa or the Cote, and however ear-piercing the screams of the inconsolable teething child in the seat behind you, just remember: At least it isn't the summer of 2020.
Maybe it is that our collective experience of Covid was so awful, but five years on, we seem to have pushed our memories of the pandemic to the vaults of our consciousnesses.
And perhaps rightly. Who, after all, wants to dwell on lockdowns and loneliness, let alone death and despair? Even the travel troubles of the era, while hardly comparable in their graveness to the toll in human life and mental health, are echoes we would like to forget.
But let me drag you back, at least in terms of sour memories, to what you were up to half a decade ago: You were trying to make sense of the 'traffic-light system' – which gave the countries of the world, including those you might have wished to visit, a rating of 'green', 'amber' or 'red' according to their reported levels of Covid infection.
You were assessing whether a dash to an Andalusian beach would mean a fortnight of quarantine when you returned, in the event of Spain being added to the 'red list'.
You were musing as to whether Spain would let you drop by in the first place, or if Britain's reputation as 'plague island' had rendered us utterly unwelcome in southern Europe. And you were shoving cotton buds up your nose, and down your throat, to comply with the Covid tests which, de rigeur that summer, revealed if you were healthy enough to go abroad – or, more troubling still, whether you were fit to jump onto an aircraft and come home again.
So yes, your plane to Crete may be 'running behind schedule'. And Tiny Tim may be planning to kick your seat for every minute of the four-hour flight. But look on the bright side: No-one is going to ask you to spit a mouthful of saliva into a test-tube this summer.
If they do, things really have gone wrong.
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