The Royal Mail Customer Support Officer looked at me with anguish and confusion that matched my own high level of anxiety.

Today is my 3rd day here but classified as Day 2, so I had to do my Day 2 PCR test, which I could, should, have done on Day 0 or Day 1 if possible. Are you following this so far?

I’ve never done a DIY swab test before so I followed the detailed instructions as best I could. The back of my throat does not look like the one in the diagram, however, and there was no dangly uvula thing, nor could I see any tonsils, though I’m sure I would have remembered having them removed. Maybe that’s another part of the general fog of childhood that was never spoken of again, who knows?

Following all of the instuctions on the £129 test – yes I was ripped off, I know that now – I went online to try and find the nearest Royal Mail Priority Postbox to send back my test package to Medicspot. Priority Postboxes for PCRs are located all over the place but I could not intitially find one that offered a Sunday collection anywhere near me, and of course as today was the latest that I could take the test, I was anxious that it would be sent off for analysis as soon as possible.

Eventually I located the one in “Bromley Post Office” the one inside WH Smith that offered a collection today so off I set up the hill.

It feels really strange not wearing a mask everywhere and coming from a ZeroCovid territory to one which is notorious for letting the virus run amok through the population. People in Hong Kong look at the UK government’s laissez-faire management of this virus with incredulity. We simply can’t understand why there are still anti-maskers here. We have been wearing our masks since January 2020, and it’s been mandatory inside and out everywhere for over a year (which doesn’t stop some people petulantly wearing their masks under their noses or chins, however.)

Walking down the road without a mask, and encountering unmasked people going the other way made me feel really uncomfortable. You have to step off into the road to distance yourself and you can’t keep crossing the road to avoid everyone. I’m not normally someone who suffers a high degree of anxiety but I felt like the Wilmington on Sea Home Guard in the opening credits of Dad’s Army: that virus is everywhere, it’s highly transmissible, and double vaxxed people’s have picked it up just by walking through the space that an infected person occupied a few minutes beforehand. If I’m paranoid, it’s not going to be about 5G Big Pharma conspiracy theories.

Initially I felt uncomfortable donning my mask when no-one else was wearing theirs but when I kept it on after leaving the Post Ofiice I felt much more protected and secure than without. Yes, I know that masks are there to protect others rather than oneself but, when no-one else is wearing one near you, they surely offer some degree of shielding. If people looked askance at me I didn’t notice. Any awkwardness I feel must surely be outweighed by trying to escape infection. I have no wish to get even the watered down, vaccine protected version. An asthmatic in my 50s, it frightens me. I am coming into contact with vulnerable people and I’m supposed to be travelling around the world. I’ll keep wearing my mask, thank you very much.

The counter assistant at the WH SMith Post Office told me that I’d come to the wrong place and that I should try the box outside Barclays. I checked the Royal Mail app again, and that did seem to say that this one offered a Sunday collection too, but then there was some confusion between that and the Google Maps location it showed. When I arrived there, the sign on that postbox told me that there was no Sunday collection, as did the sign on the postbox outside Royal Mail’s Customer Service Office further up the road.

In a state of high anxiety by now – there’s a fine for not sending off your Day 2 test in time, apparently – I went in to the office and spoke to a human, our helpful friend with the quote above. There WAS as Sunday collection from that box, even though the box specified that there wasn’t. It isn’t written anywhere apparently. You just have to check online and somehow know. They’re all like that, he told me.

As I explained that I just wanted to do what I was told to do and that I was very confused by the conflict between the information online and on the postboxes, our friend confided his exasperation with the deliberate fog around the whole covid management situation: with mask-wearing or not; with the relaxation of rules; with the denial that the virus is still around, and that 300 people died yesterday but no-one tells you about that. That 150,000 people have died but no-one talks about them.

It was  a relief to find someone else who disagreed with the sowing of confusion about the virus, just as it is when someone volunteers the opinion that perhaps the people of the UK can’t eat sovrinty. The surprise and gratitude when at least someone understands.

What has happened to this country? Or was it always like this and I hadn’t really noticed because my own bubble has been so resilient until now?