You may remember M. Albrich? He was the charming man at the border police in Port-Vendres, who said they would check us out of France and stamp our passports. We need this in order to sign off our French visa days, and then start our Schengen days when we check into Spain. We had emailed him to say it would now be Friday morning before we were in Port-Vendres, and he had emailed us back to say he would see us then.
So, on Wednesday afternoon, working through Pascal’s boat checklist in the desert-like heat on the concrete quay, we received an email from Emilie in the Police Passport office at Port-Vendres. Urgent – they needed emailed copies of our passports, vaccine certificates and a negative PCR test to be presented at the offices when we met them. What? Why the negative PCR test??
Fortunately, they had sent us two emails. The one in French actually translated as vaccine certificates and/or negative PCR tests! So we went with the vaccine certificates option. I took photos of our passports, plus our visa pages, and also our NHS Vaccine Certificates, which I had managed to scan into the French Tousanticovid app (their combined track and trace plus vaccine app). We don’t know whether our certificates work in the French app or not, but hey, who cares. We had a photo of our certificates in a French app!. We got a lovely email back from Emilie saying she would see us on Friday morning: press the bell at number 4.
We were up early on Friday morning to shower, brush our hair, clean our shoes, and to dress in smart casual clothes to meet French officials. On the way over, I realised Richard was wearing his ripped boat shorts! Oops.
We press the bell at the office with the sign saying Douanes. A recorded announcement then silence. Eventually we realise it’s actually number 3. Number 4 turns out to be an unmarked door, but the bell gets answered, and some dubious man on the ground floor points us upstairs. The offices are very typical of old public sector offices: dark corridors; a mix of modern and old-fashioned telephones; and that strange office smell. We find an office with an open door and a couple of desks. The woman at the window turns out to be Emilie, who tells us her colleague will help us.
Her colleague is a small man with a shaved head and bulging muscles, wearing a skimpy black vest and shorts, and flip flops. We immediately feel overdressed. He says one word: “passports”. We hand them over; he picks up an A4 book and motions us to follow him down further dark corridors. At this point I imagine we are heading to an AC12 interview room. Mary mother of God.
He knocks at a door and walks us into a small office. Tucked in a corner in front of us is a PC, and to our left are four people having a meeting, who break off to stare blankly at us, and then shuffle their chairs away. Our cage fighter sits down at the PC, switches it on, and then starts flicking through the pages of his A4 book. It becomes obvious he is hunting for his password.
Meanwhile, the meeting resumes. It turns out not to be a staff meeting, but an investigation interview of sorts. Ted Hastings is playing the French customs officer, grilling a foreign suspect who sometimes answers the questions and sometimes leaves them to what can only be his lawyer (or perhaps his union rep). The token woman has been cast as the translator.
Cage fighter is now getting a trifle agitated but eventually finds the right page and types in the password. The first time he’s obviously playing for laughs, as he gets it wrong. But soon, we are in the system. It’s a strange mix of English and French. He works through a few menu options (heightening our tension), but gets the right one in the end, and inserts Richard’s passport into a small passport reader at the side.
A button pops up on the screen saying “Scan”. We wait for him to click it. Instead, he removes the passport and re-inserts it. The button pops up again (good consistent computer design). We wait. Nope. He rubs his sleeve over the pages and reinserts it. Nope. He picks up the passport scanner and shakes it (I’m not kidding you). He then tries my passport.
The system has obviously scored highly in its user acceptance test as a button pops up saying “Scan”. I am screaming: “click the button” at him (silently of course, he is a French official). Richard by this time has decided it’s his turn to play Ted Hastings, and silently comes out with the immortal “Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey, can we just move this thing along before it drives us all round the bloody bend?”.
This obviously has the desired effect. Cage fighter picks up both passports, and his well-hidden password book and motions to us to follow him. Back we trot to the office, where lo!, he gets out a stamp and an ink pad, and proceeds to stamp our passports. We are free to go! Whoop Whoop!!