Postcard From Luxembourg
by Russell David "Luxembourg? That’s not a place you visit, it’s somewhere you fly over!" Such was a typical reaction when I told people I was off to the small nation land-locked by Belgium, France and Germany. But I had my reasons. One was that, like my trip to Vienna a month previously, I had paid for a hotel room there in 2020, not been able to use it thanks to the bubonic plague, and unless I filled it before the end of 2021 I would lose my money. The other reason was that by journeying to Luxembourg I would finally have visited all 27 E.U. countries! In 2018, on arriving back at Bristol Airport from yet another trip to Gran Canaria (a rubbish one) I noticed a poster listing all E.U. members. It was in that moment the idea struck me. I realised I’d been to 15 of the countries already, over many years, so why not set a target of doing all of them? In the spirit of the slogan on the T-shirt I got from Spiked, “Love Europe, hate the E.U.”, in a mad flurry I set about visiting the likes of Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Latvia and more – and I loved it. That was until the governments of E.U. member states decided to go against all of their pandemic preparedness...
