I have never visited a friend nor a relative in prison, because (to date) they have all managed to follow the laws of the land with sufficient obedience. But my recent experience at the Radisson Blu Edwardian felt pretty close to what I imagine a prison visit to be like. Which is alarming, when you consider my friend’s only crime was to go on holiday.

I landed at Heathrow on Saturday after a two-week trip to California. While away my fiancée and I paddleboarded, drank hazy IPAs and watched Lebron James shoot some hoops. I can still hear the waves crashing on Malibu Beach. It was soul cleansing to get away, and it came as a relief that, despite the rumours of Covid officiousness in West Coast USA, I did not see people wearing face masks outdoors and we were only asked for our vaccine certificates on entry to two cafés.

In fact the main Covid consideration was that, not for the first time during the pandemic, we looked on from afar as things escalated back home. It’s amazing how quickly things can change. On my last day at work on Friday November 26, we had just learnt of the (then named) ‘nu’ variant, which wasn’t yet in the UK, and a colleague remained confident he would win our longstanding 10p bet on whether Boris Johnson would tell the nation to work from home before Christmas. I said he would, he reckoned he wouldn’t. What a difference a fortnight makes.

Thankfully, the United States remained off the UK’s red list, meaning we wouldn’t have to enter hotel quarantine on our return. However, while we were away two new travel restrictions were brought in: the reintroduction of the pre-departure test before coming home, and the imposition of mandatory Day 2 PCR tests for all arrivals, with a requirement to self-isolate until you receive your result. In total, these rules added £300 to the price of our holiday for two.

Or £312, I should say, for shortly after landing, we took a black cab to the Radisson Blu Edwardian Heathrow (a galling £12, five-minute journey) to have a swab twizzled in our throats and nostrils by our (and Owen Paterson’s) good friends at Randox. 

While wheeling our suitcases through the Radisson Blu car park towards the ominous white testing tent, we noticed that many of the hotel rooms had their curtains wide open, and that they were all occupied. Strange. It was hard not to glance into the ground-floor rooms. Most of the people were lying on their beds watching television, while others tapped away on laptops. In one room, a couple of children concentrated on a game of some sort on the carpet. The penny dropped. This was a quarantine hotel.

I knew that my friend Mickey and his girlfriend were under lock and key, somewhere. Late last month they had travelled to South Africa for a week-long holiday when the country was suddenly added to the UK’s red list due to fears surrounding the omicron variant, and they were unable to get home in time. There are 16 quarantine hotels in the UK, but I thought I’d try my luck. 

“Don’t suppose you’re staying at the Radisson Blu Edwardian at Heathrow? I’m in the car park,” I messaged with cold thumbs.

“That’s the one.” he replied. “We’ll come and say hi. Need to get hold of the guard. Give me five minutes.”

Mickey didn’t have to specify where we would meet. In a corner of the car park there was a penned area, no bigger than a seven-a-side football pitch, where people were walking, smoking or jogging. These were the quarantine hotel inmates, whose crime was to have travelled to a sub-Saharan African country when they were perfectly entitled to do so.

And then along came Mickey and his partner, who had received the go-ahead from their warden to step outside. They looked well, and were smiling, probably because today was the final day of their 10-day quarantine, meaning they would be released at midnight. We stood at a metal barrier, three or four metres away from our friends who leaned on a barrier of their own. Behind them, their fellow quarantine occupants circled their concrete leisure zone in an anti-clockwise loop. This, Mickey told us, was not a rule, but something people just seemed to do. It is funny how habitually orderly the British can be.