JUST SAYING

Willing to give anything a go to ease the stress of PCR testing, Annabel Fenwick Elliott tries a new pre-departure airport option

Of all the irritations involved with leaving the country in this era, the worst of them, easily, is testing. I had hoped, silly old me, that the whole charade was a temporary evil designed to tide us over until the vaccinations were ready. But here I am, fully inoculated, one year and eight months after the start of the pandemic, still Googling the nearest, cheapest place to get my nostrils brutalised by a cotton swab so that I can board a plane.

I was intrigued therefore to learn of Heathrow and Gatwick Airports’ new testing option: PCR results within three hours, predeparture. This would negate the need for either a separate pilgrimage to a test centre in the days leading up to one’s trip, or tedious games of “Will it get lost in the post or not?” and “Did I do it right?” should you opt for the self-swab gamble.

And so I booked rapid PCR tests at £95 each for my boyfriend and myself at London Heathrow’s Collinson testing centre (collinsongroup.com), ahead of our trip to South Africa, and timed it so the results would come back an hour after check-in opened.

There are two notable downsides to this particular option. First, you really are extra-specially stuffed if you test positive. Second, you have three hours to kill as you await the results in the bowels of Hillingdon, with

Hounslow to the east and Slough to the west. Still, we turned up (15 minutes late) with optimism in our hearts. The centre was easy to find by postcode, which was our first surprise. And it didn’t matter that we were late (our second surprise).

We were tested at 5.15pm. Our obvious first stop after that was the nearest pub, where we were sitting with a pint and a glass of wine by 5.21pm, playing “Refresh the Collinson website every four minutes” to learn of our fate. Then we enjoyed a brief amble in Cranford Park, which has 144 acres of very pleasant wood, meadow and wetlands,

We were playing ‘Refresh the Collinson website every four minutes’

which was cut short by the emergence of an email from Collinson at 6.21pm, with – bingo! – two Fit-to-Fly certificates attached. Off we marched to the Virgin Atlantic check-in, having wasted only 66 minutes of waiting-and-worrying time, which has to be a record. Indeed, I’d say this is the most faff-free way I have thus far been able to get my hands on a pre-travel PCR test. Provided you don’t test positive, of course.