First thing first: I’m back. Back in London. Back on the boat. Back after 391 days.
Yes, I’m back. But of course it’s not that simple because it never is. I’d intended to return around March 22 to make it an even year away, which seemed like a nice punctuation mark. However, things did not go to plan. It turned out that the long-postponed job I’d had on the Opening and Closing Ceremonies for the Dubai World Expo finally lurched back to life in the new year and they decided to have an in-person workshop in Dubai in mid-April. I was asked to attend in order to make cheap-and-cheerful prototypes of various actual physical objects to be carried, waved, flapped about and otherwise manipulated in the actual performance space by real people actually in each other’s presence. What a weird idea.
That left me with a choice - fly back to London as intended and quarantine for 10 days on the boat, then have a week of “freedom” before flying to Dubai for the workshops. Or, hang around freeloading off my sister for an extra few weeks and fly directly from Canada. Naturally I took option number two, because the Dubai business meant I’d have to quarantine on returning to London anyway, and I didn’t fancy ten days quarantine on the boat in March, and another ten days after Dubai in April.
Thus, 391 days. And my first days back were, of course, in quarantine. But instead of arriving from a “Amber List” country (Canada) I was arriving from a “Red List” country (UAE). Thus, instead of ten days in the cramped but familiar and much-missed confines of the boat, I’d have to spend ten days at Her Majesty’s pleasure in a managed quarantine hotel. Luckily, the production company paid the £1750 cost of the quarantine package, which included the hotel, three meals a day, and the two COVID tests I’d need before they’d let me out. In my naivety, I sort of thought that quarantining in a hotel might be simpler than quarantining on the boat. For instance, there’d be unlimited wifi. And unlimited hot water. And food would just show up without me having to figure out how to get groceries delivered. And I could raise my arms above my head.
Ha. I truly was naive. Then again, I’m no stranger to quarantine. Before I landed at Heathrow I’d already done 35 days in total, so I thought I knew what I was in for. Sure, it wouldn’t be the same luxurious environs of my first quarantine in Canada. I could accept that a hotel room wouldn’t offer the same space and facilities as a carefully chosen AirBnB, but my thinking was coloured by the comfortable and pleasant week of quarantine in Abu Dhabi. That room was spacious and well-equipped with a small fridge, generous storage space, a separate couch-ish area, and a large window that faced the sunrise. The Holiday Inn Express at Terminal 4 had exactly none of those things.
But let’s back up a bit again. Because it was by no means a quick and simple process getting from the landing gate to my cell at H.M.P. Heathrow. And while I appreciate that the whole hotel quarantine thing is relatively new, they’ve had a bit of time to work out the kinks now and I was expecting a slightly smoother process.
First, there’s a lot of paperwork required when travelling internationally during a pandemic. Of course I needed proof of a negative COVID PCR test, performed within the proscribed period (differing depending on destination and - word to the wise - sometimes even required when you’re only transiting through an airport not staying in the country. More on that another time…). I also needed a completed “Passenger Locator Form” and proof that I’d booked the managed quarantine package. And for some reason that documentation had to be checked at several stages by several people reached by standing in several long queues of passengers who seemed to have forgotten about trying to stand two metres apart.
And then there was an extended period spent in a small alcove near the baggage carousels while an ever-growing group of exhausted travellers waited for buses to the various hotels. This was especially frustrating, because there was no queueing system, and no sorting of people according to which hotel they’d been booked into, of which there are many. When I finally got on a bus it was full of people going six different places, meaning that the bus had to stop at a hotel, unload the unsorted luggage from the compartment under the bus, check and cross-check the people and the luggage with the information at the hotel, close up the luggage compartment, and then proceed to the next hotel to repeat the same process. Naturally I was in hotel number six and was the only person left on the bus when we finally arrived at my stop. From the time the plane landed to the time I got to the reception desk it was four hours later.
Eventually I found myself in Room 508, and it was not good. My hotel room in Abu Dhabi had a huge window that even opened a tiny bit. Room 508 had a window of course, but it was a solid pane - no fresh air for me! Worse, though, was that the window faced INTO THE BUILDING. And I don’t mean it looked onto another building. I mean the window looked into the hotel itself. Whatever genius designed that place created a large covered atrium area surrounded on all sides by hotel, meaning that each guest had a 50-50 chance of getting a room facing out at the actual world, or one facing… other hotel rooms.
Of course there was no min-bar fridge. No drawers to unpack into. No proper desk. And certainly no couch. A Holiday Inn Express is not designed for long term guests. It’s designed for overnight stays by people who have an early flight the next morning. Emphasis is on providing a comfy bed, a giant tv and a good shower. Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers will not be surprised to hear that my first day at H.M.P. Heathrow was not a happy one.
Oh, and that first day? That’s not Day One of quarantine. That’s Day Zero. So even though I’d landed at 7:00am, that day didn’t count. Welcome home. I can understand why page 11 of my 28-page Welcome Pack included a list of eight different mental health services I could contact if it all got to be a bit too much. (Including one called C.A.L.M. - Campaign Against Living Miserably. And I am NOT making that up.)
Once I’d resigned myself to Room 508 and memorised the C.A.L.M. number, my next job was the menu. Along with the Welcome Pack, I’d also received full page menus for every day of my sentence.
Charmingly, I was required to choose my options for every meal of my entire stay on the morning of Day Zero. So, for instance, I needed to report whether I wanted a cheese omelette or a vegan sausage roll with my breakfast the following Saturday. Now I’m generally a person who loves having a plan, but even I found this a bit much. Then again, it actually turned out to be fairly simple, because who in their right minds would want “Vegetable Nasi Goreng” for breakfast when they could have a Bacon and Egg Omelette Bap? All my choices were duly entered into a web-page and, I thought, properly recorded for my future dining pleasure.
Ha.
On Day Zero I waited two hours for both lunch and dinner, and had to call to follow up in order to be fed. I put this down to that fact that I’d arrived too late for the computer system to record my choices and had to indicate my preferences on paper at check-in. No matter, because surely all would be fine for Day One breakfast, which arrived at 7:30 the next morning in a brown paper bag outside my door.
Not. My Cornish Sausage Roll was conspicuously absent, with a cup of porridge in its place. I managed to flag down the delivery guy, who changed out the porridge, and sat down to breakfast trusting that the mix-up was an isolated incident.
Then Day One lunch was wrong. But this time the woman doing the delivery wouldn’t exchange things, because I’d touched the erroneous sandwich, therefore potentially slathering it with the plague. So she brought me the salad I’d asked for and I kept the sandwich too. Again, not diet-friendly. But surely supper would be correct.
Not. This pattern repeated for most meals until on Day Four I was finally able to express my frustration adequately to the guest services people, who told me to request a security escort to the reception desk and fill out a paper form for the remaining meal choices. Because obviously the computer system was - and I’m going to use a technical term here - utterly fucked. I did that, and went to bed with a glimmer of hope that the next morning would deliver my Bacon and Egg Bap without drama.
Which it did. Sort of. In fact, it delivered TWO Bacon and Egg Baps, along with the rest of two complete breakfasts, in two brown paper bags. Well-played, Holiday Inn Express, for finding a new and interesting way to screw up. By this point I was beyond caring, and simply had a double Bacon and Egg Bap and put the extra cereal, juice and snacks to my growing hoard of uneaten non-perishables. Eventually you have to accept that you have no control at all and just take the double bacon when you get it.
The food situation certainly kept me on my toes. But the lack of natural light was a downer, and it was weird to have no sense of the outside world at all. Eventually I realised I could get YouTube onto the giant tv and found a nice live-streaming camera of a street in Oxford that I just kept on all day. Oddly, I couldn’t find a nice view from a London camera, but the Oxford one was a street I remembered from my visit during the Grand Tour, and was a close enough shot that I could see people moving around, which was nice.
The most exciting development - other than the double bacon - was the arrival of my Day Two COVID test kit. This was a self-administered test of the stick-up-the-nose variety that came with a thick instruction book and a lot of little sticky barcode labels.
The reason this self-test was exciting is that once I could report a negative test result I could be allowed OUT OF THE ROOM. So when I finally got the all-clear late on Day 4 I quickly pulled on my running clothes and waited for my security escort. (Anyone leaving their room for any reason had to be accompanied by a security guard. I suppose to prevent them from making a break for freedom. Fair call, I guess.) And where did my guard lead me?
And thus the days passed. I was doing remote work on the Dubai project, with the standard-issue ration of Zoom meetings and paperwork. And the wifi was good, and there was Netflix, and I found a routine that passed the time. Luckily, I was free to order in alternative food or other essentials if I’d wanted, though I’d stocked up on the flight back. There was a short layover in Bahrain where I made sure to pick up a few non-perishable snacks, a fresh book for Non-Fiction Hour, and - crucially - two bottles of duty-free red wine. I even made my peace with the ridiculously tiny and non-functional table in the room, which was clearly designed by the same misanthrope who did the window.
I've complained a lot here, but it's clear the people at the hotel were genuinely trying to make quarantine an ok experience. I think they were just overburdened and under-staffed and trying to implement a system on the fly. I'm sure most quarantine rooms actually have proper windows, for instance. (Occasionally I got a glimpse of the sky from the window of the guy across the hall, if he happened to open his door at the same time I did. Lucky Room 507!) And really, it was only ten days.
On the morning of Day 11 I was free to go. In fact, I could have left at one minute past midnight, but I had a good night's sleep and enjoyed one last bacon bap and then treated myself to an Uber XL for the trip home, because I had a lot of luggage and I was in a celebratory mood. And this Uber did not disappoint.
My return to the boat was not without issues, but that’s a story for another day. For now, I’ll just say I’m ok, and despite the issues, it’s good to be back. And I’ll close with these words to live by:
Just take the double bacon.
