Minding Mersea

The name 'Mersea' comes from the Old English word 'meresig', meaning an island in the pool.

It's 3.39 am in West Mersea, England. Birds are singing outside. One fact of intercontinental air travel is that phenomenon known as jet lag, or having a brain which only slowly accepts the current time over that of the country you have exited. Hence I am awake and wondering how to turn the volume down on my feathered neighbours.

To remain hydrated, I drink copious amounts of water. Getting older also means weakening of the bladder, not in any serious incontinence way, but nevertheless uncomfortable at the small hours of the morning. So, as I am renting a room which has no attached bathroom, having a call of nature at this hour means surreptitiously creeping about, so as not to disturb others.

Being awake, my brain wants to fixate on something. It has chosen the continuance of my journey to West Mersea as a focal point. 

I stood in a very long, extremely slow moving line inching towards 'Border Control' (what we used to call Immigration). I was tired, but perhaps a little too complacent in the knowledge that all was in fact well, and that I would soon breeze back into the country of my birth.

It was not to be.

The problem was that I had somehow closed the online Passenger Locator Form, unsaved. I was to discover just how essential that form is to ingress said country.

Finally it became my turn to step up to the very well fortified Border Control cublical. All was going well until I looked online for my completed Passenger Locator Form. It was not to be found, and I had had no printing facilities available to me in Cambodia to produce a physical copy.

Now that was a problem. A returning British person who cannot prove that he has completed that, now apparently essential, form cannot enter the Isle of his birth, apparently.

What should have taken a minute or so, a quick flash of ny passport and proof of a negative Covid 19 test, took nearly half an hour to explain, then rewrite said form while standing to one side of the Border Control fortification, with much mumbling (soto voce, as there are noticies everywhere about not offending Border Control personnel).

The task was finally completed to the officer's satisfaction and, instead of being whisked off to imprisonment, I was allowed to go seek my bags which were no longer trundling around the baggage reclaim carousel, but tucked away elsewhere, or so I discovered.

The additional time taken to re-enter Blighty also meant that my booked taxi had returned to base. I contacted the company to insist that the taxi reappear. While I was waiting I changed US Dollars into Pounds Sterling and sought a local SIM card. I also attacked the ATM, which would only allow me a measly £200. Ho Hum.

The taxi arrived. To take a taxi to West Mersea from Heathrow Airport may seem a trifle extravagant, except when you consider a) the barely portable nature of my luggage and b) the risk of exposure to a vicious pandemic.

The driver was revealed to be both Sri Lankan and a frequent traveller to Malaysia. During the two hour journey conversation drifted from the many and varied delights of Kuala Lumpur, to my trip to Sri Lanka and my having lived with one of the Indian music maestro A.R.Rahman's music directors, in Chennai, and pretty soon we were arriving in West Mersea.

I had been travelling for four days, give or take. Next, 10 days quarantine.