Saturday began in a slightly different way. I set my alarm at the time I expected food to arrive: 7:30 AM. And sure enough, my eyes opened at the same time as the now-familiar knock announcing breakfast, which I wolfed down far too quickly.
This was my first non-workday in captivity - my first weekend of sorts - and I wasn’t looking forward to it. Anxious about how I’d cope with the long empty hours, I crawled back into bed as soon as breakfast was finished.
Sleep drifted in-and-out until the second food delivery woke me at 12:15 PM. The mushroom soup was so unappealing, and smelt so awful, that it went straight down the toilet before it made the room uninhabitable. The roasted vegetable panini didn’t improve matters. I ended up padding out the meal with extra bread and a few nuts from my Sainsbury’s order.
To add insult to injury, my personal lateral flow test produced yet another negative result.
The afternoon blurred into a mix of reluctant work tasks and daydreams about the outside world. I half-watched TV, browsed holiday options, and chatted with Laura once she was awake. A couple of oranges and some headache tablets passed for essential sustenance. But before I ate them, I wrote our names on them in marker pen, sat them side by side on a napkin, and drew a heart between them. Siempre. Forever. It was ridiculous. It was also the closest we had been to sitting next to each other in days.
Perhaps I was going a little mad!
Seven days in, I found myself looking back. I still had no regrets, but the confinement was proving harder than I had imagined.
Dinner arrived at 6:20 PM which was optimistically labelled as Chinese, with the usual meat to rice ratio, accompanied by a very sweet toffee sponge cake. Yet again, I added some more bread to bulk up the meal.
The hotel’s an attempt at Chinese food
A very sweet chocolate sponge
Time spent reflecting on my incarceration was both a blessing and a curse, because on this seventh day a truly maddening realisation struck me…
As there were no direct flights from Bogotá to London, my journey had been routed through Madrid. The UK quarantine rules only applied because I had set foot in Bogotá, a red zone country, within the previous eleven days.
Here’s the maddening realisation: arriving in Madrid from Bogotá didn’t trigger Spanish quarantine. And because Spain itself wasn’t on the UK’s red list, flying into London from Madrid required no quarantine either. In other words, if I had simply stayed in Madrid for eleven days - in a normal hotel, with normal freedoms - I could have walked straight into the UK without issue.
The irony was brutal: by following the rules to the letter, I had landed myself in the worst possible outcome. If I’d bent them just slightly, I could have strolled around Madrid, eaten real food, enjoyed half-decent internet, and lived like a human being instead of pacing a box like a caged tiger. Not to mention the cost.
The weight of that missed opportunity - the wasted money, the confinement, the absurdity, the massive lesson learnt – built-up until it spilled out in a sharp, frustrated “Dammit!” that bounced off the walls of my room. I had no idea if the corridor guard heard it; I half-imagined him finally looking up from his phone, shrugging, and going straight back to scrolling.
Sleep didn’t come until around 2:30 AM, after long, meandering chats with Gabi and Laura, and with my good friend Kat, who was enduring her own lockdown ordeal in Montreal, Canada.
If you want to know the full story of how I ended up in this hotel room, the complete book is available now.
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