Carcassonne — a few days before departure

Status pending. Two words, glowing gently in orange on my phone, informing me that persons unknown are, as we speak, “awaiting confirmation of my right to travel.” I read it twice. I have a valid French passport, issued by a Republic that has recognised my existence without complaint for decades. I have a valid ETA, a small digital blessing I paid good money for and received in writing. And yet somewhere in the clouds — the digital kind, not the kind over the Channel — a committee of algorithms is apparently still deliberating on whether I, personally, am allowed to cross a stretch of water that my grandparents crossed on a whim.

The app is at least honest about its limits. Chat support, it warns me, cannot help. Phone support cannot help. Only the check-in desk, and only twenty-four hours before departure, and only if the algorithm has not yet made up its mind by then. So the plan, as it stands, is to arrive at the airport in a state of bureaucratic suspense, like a man awaiting the verdict of a jury that has never met him and never will.

I mention, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, that I remember the 1960s. Long before Britain joined what eventually became the European Union — a decision I have always considered, along with a rather more famous Frenchman, to be a historical misstep — one crossed the Channel with a passport in one’s pocket and nothing else. No checks worth mentioning. No forms. No pending anything. You showed the little booklet, someone glanced at it, and that was, as they say, that.

Le Général had his doubts about the whole arrangement. History, and my boarding pass, appear to be proving him right at last.

Those were also, if memory serves, the days of Pounds and shillings and pennies — a currency you could at least understand by weight in your pocket, unlike the current system, in which my right to board a plane is apparently being weighed on scales I cannot see, by clerks I cannot speak to, according to criteria nobody has troubled to publish. Progress, I am told, is inevitable. I am simply not convinced it always moves forward.

In the meantime, I shall pack as planned, arrive early as instructed, and hope that somewhere between now and Sunday week the invisible jury reaches a verdict in my favour. If not, I understand there is a desk for that. There is, apparently, always a desk for that.