Dear Reader
WATCHING the languidly dapper Richard E. Grant buzzing around Italy for the BBC’s Write Around the World series this week was painful.
One minute he was devouring the best pizza of his life in Naples (‘I’m having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair’), then wandering through Pompeii with an effusive guide who was clearly taken by the Oscar
nominated actor, before peering out over the sublime Mediterranean sea from the balcony of a swish hotel in Positano.
Lucky, lucky boy. Naturally, the sun shone wherever he went; there were no masks to be seen and if he had asked where to get a PCR test, no one would have understood what on earth he was banging on about.
If I could go on holiday to only one country for the rest of my life, it would be Italy. I spent four months in Naples (pictured) in my 20s and quickly realised that the city’s traffic lights spoke volumes about the attitude of the place. Red, amber or green, it really didn’t matter. ‘Va bene lo stesso,’ as locals put it, which I took to mean ‘everything’s OK’. And somehow it was OK, just as the ongoing traffic-light system that determines which countries we can or cannot go to is not OK.
It’s not OK if you get rid of amber plus — which indicated that a country could easily go on the red list — and then, without warning, decide that an amber country such as Mexico should turn red, giving holidaymakers three days to fly home or face an obligatory stay in a grim quarantine hotel for which there is now a price rise.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps says the easing of restrictions to some countries means people can go on holiday ‘without looking over their shoulders all the time’. Let’s hope so, but Shapps might be advised to look over his own shoulder to see the disgruntlement on the faces of travellers and those in the travel industry.
To preside over such chaos must surely have repercussions.