How to seduce a Border Force officer

There was only a handful of us arriving at Bristol on flight 6114 from Nice. Oscar and I had the leisure to choose which of the four available UK Border Force officers we most liked the look of. None of them were your usual bruisers. One was a careworn, perhaps broken old man and during the brief wait in the taped corridor we speculated on the nature of the tragedy that had brought him here to this. My speculative theory was that he had impulsively married an unpresentable woman, who had turned out to be an incurable alcoholic who beat him. Oscar’s was that he had been discharged from prison as being too frail to constitute any further danger to the public.

The passenger he was presently dealing with either didn’t know that he had to fill in a Public Health Passenger Locator form or hadn’t bothered. The old lag wasn’t acerbic. He merely signalled the passenger exhaustedly towards a secluded area of the floor where several others were searching their rucksacks for something to write with.

What the compilers of the PHPL form crucially want to know is your phone number. Then someone can call you during the ensuing fortnight and ask you, on your honour, whether you are isolating yourself at your given address according to the law. A friend of a friend reports being rung up while eating in a crowded McDonald’s restaurant. In spite of the tumultuous background noise, the inquisitor accepted an assurance that he was indeed resting quietly at home without demur.

The last figure I saw in the paper was that nine people so far have been fined for breaking travel quarantine rules. In the 1985 UK Snooker Championship final Willie Thorne missed a blue on which the frame, the match and arguably his whole career pivoted.