Testing Times

 Testing Times

 

 

Car parks may sometimes be a welcome sight, but they are seldom a pretty one. Alexandra Park and Palace in North London, for all its attractive features (not least the views) has some pretty grim examples.

 

Fortunately, the largest area reserved for cars is in a corner by the southerly road entrance, screened by the slope and by trees. It is known as the “Paddock” car park – a name connected to the fact that for many years there was a small but popular racecourse on the flat expanse of the Park.

 

Cars are, for the time being, nowhere to be seen, the approaches to the Paddock closed. What is to be seen, well signposted by large temporary notices, is a Covid testing centre.

 

This is a rather forbidding structure, surrounded by security fencing and patrolled by security guards. Inside the perimeter is a long, low, shabby marquee, and, next door, facilities for the staff. Open at both ends, the marquee must be a freezing place to work.

(Marquee-like structures are feature of Covid life. Compare the somewhat demurer one in the Royal Academy’s courtyard, where ticketholders are processed, when allowed in.)

 

The general feel is of something that is a cross between a field hospital in wartime and a temporary holding pen for people under some institutional suspicion (refugees at a border, for example).

 

At the perimeter entrance, there’s a table with the inevitable sanitiser. Behind the table sits a booth with a high window, from which a security person instructs you to sanitise, and produce your appointment message and your ID. That checked, you are waved into a long, fenced walkway, which runs along the length of the marquee, and then up and down several turns before the entrance. It is obviously designed to pen queues; but of these there is, yet, no sign.

 

Around and up and down you trudge, to find perhaps one person ahead of you waiting to be processed. (This may of course all change.)

 

At the open entrance to the Marquee you pause, while the previous “customer” moves on, and someone pops out and scrubs down the table where they just stood. Then you step forward, to interact with a person sitting behind a thick plastic screen. Again, you produce your invitation (QR coded). This is scanned. You are told to take a black plastic wallet, which is fed through the screen, and to await onward escort.

 

You now notice that the Marquee, on either side of the central corridor from top to bottom, is divided into a number of open compartments, rather like oversized voting booths at election time. Each contains a table and chair, facing a partition to which lengthy illustrated instructions are affixed.

 

You are ushered to one of the booths and told to take off your mask (which you put on before entering the facility). Then you are alone with contents of the wallet- the test kit- and the wall instructions. Oh, and a curious vanity mirror on the table. This is to help you swab your throat, more precisely that area where your tonsils are, or were.

 

Swabbing is fiddly – tonsils, then nostril. It is also fiddly to pack everything up. The swab must be snapped in two and put in a little glass vial that contains a small amount of chemical; then the vial must be put in small, clear plastic pouch, together with (for some unexplained reason) a square of absorbent tissue; then that package must be put in a bigger, clear bio-hazard bag, sealed with adhesive. Finally, everything else must be swept into a bin.

 

No movement is permitted without an escort. One appears and scans your bag, then takes you to the other, open, end of the Marquee. There’s another plastic screen This has a slot, through which you post your bag.

 

Then out, to wait for a few days..

..until the negative result arrived, by text message, early in the morning.

 

I was tested because I subscribe to the King’s College, London, Zoe Research Project. They facilitate a test even if your symptom, as mine, is just a sniffle.

 

Jan 2021