Only as the summer approaches its end do I fully realize how much fun you can have simply sitting at home and letting the world come to you. That pretty much describes the summer. Well, “world” is a bit over the top. I really mean a microcosm of family and friends. It began with a loud bang early in June (granddaughter Sophia’s wedding) and continued with generously timed visits from all our children and, at one time or another all our other grandchildren. Last week we had the stimulation of a wonderful houseguest—once a student here, now a very senior professor at Stanford and expert on ancient Greek drama—whose wide-ranging conversation was an intellectual battery charge. We were not absolute stay-at-homes (stays-at-home?), as we did venture forth in a minimal way for a couple of great museum visits thanks to our local great friend Frank. But there’s lots to do around home. Right now, I find myself immersed in a challenging research project in a field far from my alleged specialty. As it keeps expanding, and as I work so slowly these days, I may never get so far as defining my actual topic. Remember: it’s the journey, not the destination.
We are now in the countdown to the summer’s capstone event—a repeat trip to the Provençal house party of our great English friend Andrew, whom we have known since our Oxford days in the late 1950s! I have written about earlier trips to Salernes before, and I hope I shall be able to write about the delights of this year’s French trip soon. Just at the moment what is on my mind is bureaucracy, which is at least French by way spirit and etymology. I am aware of the risk. Talking about bureaucracy may be as boring as experiencing it. Bureaucracy has been a French specialty at least since the time of Henri IV.
It is not simply that we have become elderly fussbudgets, though I acknowledge that is part of it. (Whether I “own” or even “embrace” fussbudgetry, as the online gerontologists insist I must, is another matter.) Travel really is pretty difficult for most people these days. We are scheduled to fly to the south of France on a semi-luxurious French “boutique” airline, La Compagnie, on whose direct flight from Newark to Nice we have semi-luxuriated a couple of times in the past. We are also enjoying the professional services of a travel expert who has been a personal friend of many years. And as always we enjoy the help and support of our solicitous adult children. I am hoping that with all these resources we shall be able to overcome the crisis of the PLF, which is to say, the Passenger Locator Form. We have been seriously instructed by our airline that our permission to fly to France depends upon our filling out a digital PLF correctly no later than forty-eight hours before our scheduled departure.
It is quite understandable, and also laudable, that in the midst of a pandemic the French government, or indeed any other, would like to keep track of visitors to French soil and to ascertain, in addition to their actual “Covid status,” the places these people are coming from, the specific seats they occupied on the plane, the address within those places where they are planning to hang out, and when they plan to do the hanging. The aptness of the phrase passenger locator precisely identifies the purpose of the form.
I have had enough experience living in France, that when its Bureaucracy says “Frog”, or even “Grenouille,” I jump. Resistance is generally futile, leading only to further delay and unpleasant conversations. So I went to the link to the Passenger Locator Form provided by La Compagnie. It was actually very simple. The first thing one had to do is choose one of the three destinations in which the bureaucrats are interested: France, Malta, and Slovenia. That was a piece of cake. I’m going to France. Click. The rest of the form was nearly as simple. I finished it in five minutes. Five minutes after that I had received my digital confirmation and printed out a copy.
About a week or ten days after that we got around to Joan’s form. Expert that I now was, I was eager to show her how easy it was it to get located. Go to the airline’s website, follow its link to the PLF form, and Bob’s your uncle. The form was indeed there, but it had been dramatically altered since my last visit. Your obligatory first step was still to identify your country of destination, but now there were only two possibilities, neither of which was France. I was now faced with two singularly unappealing options. I could try to find a last-minute AirB&B accommodation in Malta or Slovenia and simply suck it up. After all, nobody’s life is an endless succession of first choices. But we really wanted to go to Nice, and truth is, I wasn’t even entirely sure where Slovenia is. The other option was to try to sort out the conundrum by personal telephonic communication with a human being at the “Customer Service number” of La Compagnie. In the Internet Age no three words hold more terror than Customer Service number.
I hardly need tell you of an ordeal with which you yourself are doubtless intimately familiar. It begins with sounds of a telephone ringing for five minutes or more followed by the solemn but recorded assurance that your call is very important—though, one must conclude, just not quite important enough actually to answer. Please stay on the line…the next available agent…etc. You then advance to the Musak stage, which is essentially a progression from passive to active aggression. But at La Compagnie—boutique and semi-luxurious, remember—a very suave person does eventually pick up the phone. Over several attempts we have had both suave men and suave women. To none of these persons, however, has it proved possible to convey the subtleties of a situation not in fact resolvable by clicking the “little blue link” on their “easy-to-use form”.
The situation remains unresolved as I write this, but we remain hopeful. I noted that the Covid travel requirements fall under the portfolio of the French Ministry of the Interior. Searching the Ministry’s website, I found a document entitled “Covid 19: International Travel.” In it I read: “In light of the latest developments in the pandemic, the port health control system has been discontinued, pursuant to the law terminating the emergency measures instituted to combat the COVID-19 outbreak…Accordingly, the rules previously applied to travellers to France no longer apply effective from August 1, 2022. Travellers are now exempt from any formalities prior to entry into France, be it in mainland France or overseas, and no longer required to present a health pass, regardless of the country or place of departure.” If that’s not a smoking gun, it’s at least a steaming pea-shooter.
What seems to have happened is this. Between the time I filled out the on-line form about two weeks ago and the time Joan tried to do the same about a week later, the IT folks at the French Ministry of the Interior discovered either (1) their own recently published policy that “The rules previously applied to travelers to France no longer apply effective from 1 August 2022” or (2) that they had forgotten to make changes to their website reflecting the policy changes of which they were in theory aware. Bureaucratic change, which can be implemented at warp speed high up, at times may take a long time to soak into the consciousness of those appointed to implement it. So they simply struck France from the list, but perhaps failed to send a memo to the airlines? If any of my world-traveling readers knows anything about this, I’d love to hear from you, and soon.
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