Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

I’m living in a country that won’t let me out

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Anyone who’s been through customs Down Under isn’t surprised by the region’s OTT response to Covid. Having been X-rayed before boarding, one’s possessions are X-rayed off the plane. So shrill are the threatening posters, fine warnings and chiding announcements about importing bio-contaminants that on discovering an apple core in your pocket in the endless customs queue, you’re apt to throw up. The culture is obsessed with contagion.

Yet Britain’s Labour leadership, who throughout this pandemic have interpreted ‘opposition party’ to mean ‘people who advocate government policy even more vehemently than the government itself’, now look wistfully to Down Under as a Valhalla where they really do Covid right. Near-total border closures and tyrannical police-state lockdown enforcement seem to have tamed the tiny beast, with daily new positive tests in single digits. Australians and New Zealanders may go about their business — or at least they could do until a single case in Perth sent the state back to playing freeze tag again. So any sense of normality is provisional, and even strictly sealed borders still leak.

‘I flew in this morning.’

Those suffering from Aussie envy are presumably the same folks who peer mournfully through the bars of Wandsworth prison, where those lucky sods get three meals a day and free gym memberships, all thanks to Her Majesty. For after five agreeable book tours in Australia, I might not be going back. Rather than be billed $3,000 for never setting foot outside a tiny room with crummy food, treated the whole fortnight as more of a pariah than your average murderer, I’d rather put an ice pick through my eye. Like so many other would-be visitors, I’ve seen the Sydney Opera House before, and a refresher glimpse just ain’t worth the price. Yet it’s these very quarantine hotels that the UK is set to imitate next week.

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