Terry Prone: Booster shot injects a degree of confidence to assuage travel guilt

On the flight, passengers are packed tighter than sardines.

Sunday

I text the friend I’m due to meet for a working lunch, telling her I have been dithering around all morning wondering if we should pay attention to Dr Tony and postpone. 

Within seconds the reply arrives. We are of one mind; no lunch. We will find other ways to deal with our project. 

Two things strike me arising from this quick exchange. 

The first is that long before the Government gets to laying down the law of lockdown on us, the adults in the room are already cutting down the number of people they meet each week. We have seen the enemy and he is us.

Monday

Flu jab time. The nurse checks if she has the right person, if I’m still right-handed (which makes me feel rigid and unimaginative, because I am), then invites me to stand up on the yoke where they lower the boom on your head.

“Need to get your height and weight,” she says.

“For the flu shot?” I ask.

“No,” she says, laughing.

The HSE has brought in this new arrangement whereby anybody over a certain age with an underlying condition will be regularly seen by the GP in order to prevent the underlying condition — asthma, in my case — losing the run of itself. The scales says I have lost a stone during the pandemic.

This may explain why I’m having to stuff my high heels with kitchen paper to stop them falling off.

Tuesday

A medical consultant pal (that phrase establishing me as not so much a name dropper as a title dropper) emails, having had the booster because of the nature of her work and suggests that when I get the same, I should expect to feel ropy the next day.

“Just chomp down on the paracetamols,” she advises.

You can see the advantage of cosying up to specialists. You get that kind of highly scientific advice for free. The only problem is that I promptly forget it, so today, the day after my booster shot, I find myself thinking that it’s just as well I have a PCR test coming up because maybe I have somehow become infected.

It’s not just the breathlessness. It’s the sense that someone has set about me with a two-by-four. When Specs, the tortoiseshell cat, head butts my arm affectionately, I leap a mile and yell like I’ve been shot. This payoff is infinitely satisfying to the cat, who tries to do it again, and makes me finally cop on that what’s wrong with me is booster hangover and vaccination dead arm.

I should have been chomping down on paracetamols, as my medical friend advised, instead of imagining I had the bug.

Wednesday

I am due at the airport at 7pm to get PCR-tested for Covid before they’ll let me on a plane to the US. For no good reason, I decide to get a taxi, rather than drive. This proves interesting because the driver, in the dark, goes for a shortcut which involves him driving over a low wall and wrecking the lawn. I don’t know whether I should worry about his undercarriage or tick him off for ploughing up the grass, so remain silent.

The testing clinic is called Randox and I keep associating this with bath salts. Arriving, I find an outdoor queue, which is fine because although it’s dark, it’s not that dark. It’s cold, but not that cold. I produce my phone authorisation and get tested, reflecting, as this happens, on how incredibly improved PCR testing is over what it was at the beginning, when it felt like they were doing brain surgery without anaesthesia and weren’t terribly sure of where their probe was headed.

It’s when I come out I’m glad I took the taxi. If I hadn’t, they’d have search parties out for me, because Randox has been situated in the airport equivalent of the middle of nowhere.

Thursday

The Spanish have a new law: If you want to complain to a human, you can complain to a human, not a robot. It’s your right.

Every other EU country, please copy.

Friday

Randox tell me the PCR test is negative; I’m good to go.

My guilt levels have receded somewhat, too. When I first planned this trip, a voice in my head kept saying: “But New York has high levels of Covid. Should you be going there?”

But at this point, Ireland has such high levels of Covid that, given I have had my booster, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. Except that now, I see this trip as kind of an examination in personal competence.

After two years, with all the new regulations making it impossible to travel, will I manage it, bearing in mind that in addition to passport and boarding pass, passengers now need their vaccination cert and PCR confirmation. It’s all on my phone, David O’Hagan the travel agent reminds me. I can’t tell him that I have a pathetic affection for paper. I love paper and would much prefer to be carrying a sheaf of forms rather than an iPhone with notions.

So anxious am I that I arrive at the airport a full four hours in advance of the flight. They’re happy I’m vaccinated and PCR-tested, but present two extra challenges: An attestation form and a contact tracing one. These get downloaded to your phone which ensures that when you need to look up details like the Zip code of your destination hotel, you can’t because the form disappears when you leave it, thereby demonstrating, yet again, the value of paper forms.

The woman in front of me is one notch south of hysteria because she can’t remember her daughter’s address or phone number without her diary, which is in her suitcase which has already gone through. She is calmed and herded gently by Margaret Brown from Aer Lingus, who herds me also, although this helpful herding does require me going to the back of the queue three times.

Later, at the boarding gates, they want everything through an app called Verifly and if you don’t have it, where do you go? Yep. To the back of the queue.

By the time I get on the flight, I have spent more than two-and-a-quarter hours being processed and have covered miles reversing to the back of various queues in a terminal where it’s difficult to sit down for a minute because every second seat is labelled unusable in the interests of social distancing. Funny thing is, on the flight, that goes right down the tubes with passengers packed tighter than sardines.

Saturday

Ireland is casual about Covid compared to Manhattan. Every taxi blares rules and regulations at you. Everybody wears masks.

They’ve even ditched room service in my hotel because of the dangers it poses. Really? Thirty seconds of shared air with a waiter as your meal gets handed over? It’s impressive, all the same.