Cathy Dobbs: Big queues for passport control? Quelle surprise

The queues at Dover are horrendous – I should know as I was in them on Saturday.

Travelling the last two miles to the port took two hours and 20 minutes. Crawling along, and often at standstill, was such a stressful way to start the holiday. We missed our ferry, but then so did the other tens of thousands of people in the queue.

It didn’t seem to matter, we were just put on the next available one. The stress was clear in the beeping horns, the drivers who got out for a walk around, the fury when you reached a junction and pulled out from one queue into another, the crying children and the angry drivers.

The issue is with French passport control – surprise surprise it’s the French holding everything up, with their enhanced post-Brexit checks. Thankfully the French flag is all over this mess. It was emblazoned on every booth we spent the last hour queuing towards.

Once sat down with a cuppa we got chatting with the family next to us. They were only going to France for a day trip and it had taken them four hours to get from Ramsgate in Kent. A shocking journey just to pick up some duty free.

In France it was a completely different story, the roads were clear and we sailed along to our Northern France destination. Whether we were on the fast autoroute or the attractive route national, one thing became clear – France is like how we were in the UK before we all got so rich and overcrowded. Because France is so large the fields stretch on for miles and the roads are practically empty.

I’m sure it’s a different story in the cities, but it reminded me of growing up in the 80s. Countryside, which has now been built on, surrounded our South Staffordshire village. When cycling along the A41 with my brothers I used to shout “car coming, keep in” – now there is a constant stream of traffic.

The constant narrative in the UK is that so many of us are poor and struggling to make ends meet. But is it actually that our expectations are higher and four cars on the drive is just considered the norm? Anyway, I’ve got croissants and baguettes to tuck into while I enjoy the beautiful French countryside.

There is a joke that God created France, the most beautiful country in the world and ended up feeling guilty about it. So, to make it fair on the rest of the world he created the French people.

Looks like some of the worst ended up in charge of border control.