It had been 20 months since I last travelled to Europe.
Back then, a trip to the continent was no more difficult than heading up to Leeds for the weekend and was often much cheaper thanks to the spiralling cost of domestic train travel in the UK.
But fast forward one year, one pandemic and one exit from the European Union and things could hardly be more different.
The night before our flight my girlfriend and I took a short walk around the block in a bid to switch off.
At the top of our street, a fight had broken out between a man in a car and the owner of the local petrol station who had refused him access into the forecourt.
As they quarrelled a petrol tanker showed up and started to replenish the pumps. By the time we had returned from our walk the queues of cars stretched several hundred metres up the road.
It wouldn’t be the last queue of such magnitude we would see in the next 24 hour period.
The check-in process went smoothly. After printing umpteen forms and downloading umpteen apps we manage to obtain the golden ‘docs checked’ stamp from the desk which ensured a relatively straightforward passage through Departures.
On arrival into Madrid we still had Covid bureaucracy on our minds, convinced that we must have got something wrong or misplaced a form that would enable our entry into the country.
As it turned out, that would be the least of our worries.
No sooner had we left the jetway had we been met with a long and winding queue, with a member of staff directing all UK citizens to the back of it.
Electronic gates for EU citizens saw the other passengers straight through as we waited for 2 hours to clear security – ten minutes longer than it took to fly from Heathrow!
The man in front of us, clearly unimpressed, turned to us and said: ‘They didn’t put this on the side of a bus, did they?’ as we entered another hall of queueing passengers.
‘Quite’, I thought, but at least they’ll all get a stamp in their shiny new blue passports.
On previous trips to Madrid I had rushed to see the Royal Palace or Retiro Park. This time, all I wanted to see was well-stocked supermarkets.
In contrast to the UK, fresh fruit was spilling off the shelves and the fridges looked enticing and plentiful. The Mercado de San Miguel was as pumping and as busy as ever, also unimpeded by staffing or supply issues.
We took a car down south and found that, instead of people fighting on forecourts, they were congregating, laughing, with the station manager out quickly to see that you had all you need.
The economy was functioning, the country seemed to be thriving, and the bloc seemed to be moving on after Brexit in a way that the instigator has been unable to.
Related: WATCH: UK issues, result of ‘badly implemented Brexit by Brexiteers’ – EU
