As I locked up the tandem to a bench outside the Poetry café (powered Julius Meinl coffee roasters, proclaimed the sign) a man on an electric scooter pulled over and greeted me in rapid Russian. “Good luck on your trip” he said, “all of Moldova supports you from our hearts”. He shook my hand and was off, whirring down the new pavement. The encounter was warm, brief and sweet and it had me shaking my head as I recounted my visit to the MedExpert centre minutes before.

I walk in and ask for a Covid test. “Wait” comes the reply in Russian from a lady wearing apron, mask and hairnet. A few minutes later she is back, with a mother and little crying daughter in tow. They leave.

“Have you booked?”

“No…” I begin.

“Why not?” snaps the reply. I explain I have never had to before. She gives me a long, hard look.

“Is it possible?” I ask.

“Passport”. I pull out my phone and show her a photo of my passport.

“What’s this?” Either I imagine her voice, or the question was evident in every inch of her being. Quite an achievement, given she was fully covered and masked.

“It’s my passport. Look, here is my name, date of birth, nationality. It’s all there”.

“Where is your passport?” Her eyes suspiciously dissect me.

“At home” I shrug. “Why do you need it? This has been fine before”.

The intensity of her glowering should have melted the frosty atmosphere. Instead, in some demonic paradox, temperature drops a further couple of degrees.

A form, in Russian, is thrust at me. I fill it out, putting my Place of Work as “University”. I also play it safe and say I have not travelled in the last 14 days – essentially true as I have been in Moldova all of this time.

I slide the completed form back to her, the glass between us reminiscent of an exhibit at the zoo. Who is who? I wonder.

“I can’t read this” she says, gesturing to where my name is written in block capitals.

“Would you like my passport photo?”. She grabs my phone and stabs the keyboard, skewering each key with a nail as if it were a morsel of meat to be kebabed.

“What does this say?”. She points to the year of my birth. “Is it a 1, a 5? It could be anything”.

Pointing to the photo I suggest it is a 4.

My phone number gets the same treatment.

She moves further down, to Place of Work and pauses. A new silence ices over the desolate tundra.

“University. What University?”.

This had seemed a safe bet, surely safer than “tandem”, but apparently my vagueness had given me away.

“Oxford”. An answer that was once true.

The most delightful thing happens. Unbidden, her eyebrows rise and keep soaring. I would usually describe such a movement as “imperceptible” and surely she would have imagined she controlled each muscle and quiver of her face like an impresario with a lashing whip, each attempted twitch of the mouth cowered into submission.

But no, her eyebrows continued searching her fringe for a suitable response. I enjoyed this cessation of interrogation, though I wondered what horrors awaited my nose for such an audacious answer. Previous tests had violated my deepest nasal cavities, provoking my regression into a spluttering, streaming, snotty child. My eyebrow-less medic hardly seemed inclined towards gentleness.

With a flick of her finger she indicated I should sign here and here. I passed the paper back once more and she walked off. I followed, a willing lamb to the slaughterhouse beyond. I sat replying to a message on my phone whilst she assembled her weapons – swab, stick (no scalpel).

“Put your phone away. Can you do this for two minutes?”. She had rediscovered her voice.

Suitably admonished and with the offending object nestled in my hand – screen off – I proffered my sacrificial nose up high.

The invasion was unpleasant, but to my relief she was not sadistic; perhaps my pathetic coughing was enough for her and she wanted to avoid an explosion of splattering droplets.

At any rate, I escaped largely unscathed. I called out a cheery “goodbye!” – I was leaving her, after all, but received nothing in return until I was at the door. It certainly wasn’t a muttered “goodbye” and here my imagination translated for me: “good riddance”.

No matter. I strode out into the winter air and let the door swing shut.