The naughty list turns sunseekers into middle-class criminals

Ishould be in France right now, eating a croissant for breakfast, slathering the thing in apricot jam from the garden and washing it down with a delicious mug of rosé. Sadly, I’m not. I’m sitting in Crystal Palace, where there’s a lamentable lack of apricot trees and I’ve never seen a single man wearing a string of garlic like a handbag.

I couldn’t go to France because I didn’t have time to quarantine on the other side and I spent the week leading up to the Government’s decision dithering over whether I should book a pedicure or not. “Oh just go,” said one anonymous friend, when I moaned about the situation. “Who’s going to check if you quarantine properly when you get back?”

This friend, I need to tell you, is the sort of person who would never put the wrong sort of plastic in the recycling bin and yet here she was, advocating that I return from holiday and skip around the country’s care homes to have a jolly good breathe over everyone. Close enough, anyway.

She wasn’t the only one; the more I grumbled about my sad and tragic plight, the more I seemed to come up against middle-class criminals. “Stop fussing, go away and enjoy yourself,” was the general gist of their advice. And this is (pretty much exactly) what another friend told me a few days later: “Course you should go. My friend’s wife’s sister’s aunt came back from the Algarve last week and they’re ringing her three times a day but on her mobile so it’s fine. She was halfway down the M4 when they called yesterday, ha ha!”

Finally, roughly 36 hours before my flight, France was added to the naughty list and I emailed my hosts apologetically to say I couldn’t make the trip. Was this very feeble of me? Am I too much of a goody-goody? Are you all, in fact, reading this from the breakfast table in Provence and having a terrific laugh at my expense? Various others pointed out that I’d be “much safer” in a remote part of the south of France than I would kicking about south London.