LUKANYO MNYANDA: UK quarantine: where the scenery of prison show ‘Oz’ meets its cooking style

Do you know what the worst thing will be, I say to my friend in Edinburgh on day four of my incarceration in a hotel at Heathrow Airport in London. At least, I think it was day four. 

Another confusion about this hotel quarantine prison situation, you can never get a clear answer as what “Day 1” is and when you will get out. I’ve made arrangements on the assumption that I’m out on Tuesday, though I've also been told that my last day could actually be on Wednesday. I’ll find out soon enough when I try to leave. But I digress.

The one thing that’s going to annoy me the most I tell my friend, is that the day I’m due to leave, having parted with close to R50,000 that I don’t have, will be the day they realise how pointless it was and end this charade. No, he says. The worst thing will be if SA retaliates and you end up doing the same when you return to Johannesburg. I can’t help but laugh loudly at the thought.

It speaks to SA’s more sensible approach nowadays. It wasn't always like that. We did close our own borders for months in 2020, to the ludicrous degree that we imposed sanctions on our wine exports because the government had decreed that alcohol couldn’t be transported under any circumstances. This is an unequal relationship and our options to fight back are rather limited.

It’s my second hotel quarantine of 2021, and the third overall if I count the more pleasant home isolation ahead of Christmas in 2020. What would become known as the “SA variant” was starting to make headlines and it went downhill from there and the travel bans that devastated SA's tourism industry wouldn't be lifted for 10 months. And the relief would be short-lived before Omicron emerged.

My colleagues tell me you must write something. But how do you do it without whinging? I don’t want to be one of those middle-class people complaining on Twitter about how hard-done they are, when they at least had freedom of movement.

It’s unpleasant and expensive, but I’m hardly a would-be clinging on for dear life to a moving plane in a desperate and futile attempt to escape Kabul before the Taliban comes for me. Missing my friend’s wedding that’s taking place around the corner doesn’t sound like the worst thing that has ever happened to anybody. But the last few days, I have been angry. The British news channels are buzzing with a scandal that has displayed the moral bankruptcy of the British government that with a stroke of a pen last week condemned millions of people in SA dependent on tourism to a miserable festive season. 

A year ago, when I was self-isolating and the UK was virtually closed, the prime minister’s aides had a party that broke his own lockdown rules, and for good measure had a laugh about it. It wasn’t a joke just at the expense of South Africans, but also their own people, with more than 70,000 people in England having at this point died after contracting Covid-19. 

That has made this latest quarantine harder to take though the actual experience of it hasn’t been as bad as the tales I’ve read elsewhere. I wasn’t bused to Milton Keynes, which I’d struggle to find on a map. My hotel is about a two-minute drive from the terminal at Heathrow airport. Of course, it took a lot longer to reach it, with the wait to get on a bus, where we were all cramped in, presumably so that we could infect each other with Covid-19, while we first wait for it to go to the hotel, and then to be let out. 

“We could have got here a lot quicker if they had just let us walk,” says the agitated Englishman who just can’t help himself, even though he knows shouting at the immigrant Asian workers on minimum wage won’t get him anywhere. They are not the villains here and certainly have no power.

That’s another thing that puzzles me. I thought Brexit meant fewer immigrants. The only white English person I’ve encountered is the manager who couldn't exactly work out what my release date is. So, I’ve taken the Asian guy’s word for it, and assumed I'm off on Tuesday. The arrival of the Covid-19 test on day 8 confirms this was the correct call. 

And the hotel itself? It’s a decent enough. The food is bland to be fair, and I’m only complaining because the equivalent of R5,000 a night is a lot if the ravioli is so devoid of taste you can’t tell what’s stuffed inside it. Anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not good with my vegetables, but I’d like to think I know the difference between spinach and the other thing that looks a bit like pumpkin but is slightly sweeter. And tonight, I can’t tell what I’m having.

We landed at 8pm, so it was properly dark outside. But there is a twist. When I wake up in the morning it’s still dark outside. By 8.30am, it’s still dark, and I'm not even in Scotland where it's supposed to be dark the whole time. Then it starts to make sense. What I thought was “outside” when looking out the window at night is in reality an indoor courtyard. Then it dawns upon me. No natural light for the next 10 days. And the windows don’t open either.

It's nothing like the quarantine hotels that they had in Pretoria during the early days of our lockdown, which were apparently pleasant, and where the lock-up rules were reported rather loosely enforced. But people do seem to be in good spirits. A lot of gallows humour about. On my daily runs and walks, the dreary parking lot reminds me of those gritty American TV shows like Oz, which was on SA screens in the late 1990s. There’s no violence here though.

The fence is pretty low too. There’s a bus stop. More than once, I’ve wondered what will happen if I jump over, get on one of those red busses and find a place that serves proper coffee. That could be my own prison break. A Seattle coffee, or something resembling it, would do nicely. It doesn’t take long to grow tired of the tasteless Douwe Egberts instant coffee. There's lot of time to kill, so I go to Google and discover that it’s from the Netherlands. 

There are other things that annoy. You need to call a guard to come and fetch you when you want to go for a walk, and it can be like dealing with an SA government department where they just don’t answer the phone sometimes. It’s not all doom and gloom. The London locals often have visitors who drive and park at the other parts of the fence and have socially distanced chats and cigarettes with their family members.

After a week, some people have taken matters into their own hands. On my daily walk in the parking lot, I see that some have decided  instead of walking around in circles, they are going to sit with beers and wine and smoke cigarettes. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma would not be impressed. I wonder if they are South Africans. Back in my room, I think a beer is not a bad idea, so I call room service. They’ve run out. I’m always the last to know.

And it’s nice that I can easily identify which of the fellow inmates are South African. From the playground back to the hotel is about 200m walk and you always know when you’ve gone past one of your own people. They never fail to wave or say “morning” loudly. Maybe I'm being sentimental about us being a fundamentally friendly people.

It reminds me of my first days in the UK when I hadn’t quite unlearnt the habits from back home, and insisted on greeting every cyclist or runner I came across and have them stare blankly in return.

I’ve made it to the ninth night and the Guardian announces that the prime minister, Boris Johnson will be addressing the nation. On the first quick reading, I allow myself to believe he’ll be announcing his resignation. It’s not that: he’s telling people to go get their booster shots. He might no longer have the moral authority to impose another lockdown, but on this particular point, the British do seem to be heeding the call, judging by how hard to get appointments are.

A few hours later, news breaks that back home, President Cyril Ramaphosa has tested positive for Covid-19. Then it’s Monday —the last day.

Headlines about an Omicron “tidal wave” are making me feel uneasy about my impending freedom and braving the streets of London. Suddenly I’m wondering if my little prison is really that bad. I may be succumbing to a bout of what they call Stockholm syndrome.