Richard Curtis’s iconic Love Actually airport scenes may fall on the wrong side of saccharine, but they capture something of the human story at the centre of the travel experience. As the government pursues an ‘Australian-style’ hotel quarantine scheme for the UK’s borders, we should not lose sight of these human moments.
With the UK’s hospitals stretched to the limit and the population’s patience wearing thin, it is tempting to envy Australia, where images of seaside holidays and packed summer festivals filter out from the antipodes, shimmering like a desert mirage. Like many of its counterparts in the Asia-Pacific, Australia moved swiftly in the early phases of the pandemic to shut its borders, and imposed hotel quarantine systems for all arrivals. Now, it seems, its citizens are able to live a gilded life of unimaginable freedoms, while we here in Britain stagger our way through an endless winter of discontent.
We can all agree that the policing of Britain’s borders during the pandemic has been mind-bogglingly lax.
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