Sunday 3rd November

Not such a bad drive home as it happens, though it did rain almost all the way.  But we slept and stopped for drinks and walking the dogs every hour or so.  But at Calais there was the usual miserable ending.  It was lashing with rain as we struggled with the dogs over to Canine Control to have them checked.  We had of course visited our regular vet in Eymet who did a full check-up and vaccinated them for worms and signed their passports.  Polly had run out of pages for worm treatments and the Vet wrote a note to say he was signing and stamping the book on the spare pages at the back of the passport.  He assured us that this was okay and as he had signed the book we would have no problem.

No such luck.  The officials at Calais appear to be on a mission.  That mission it seems is to turn away as may pet-owners as they possibly can on any technicality.  They insisted that as the stamp and signature were not on the correct page they were invalid and wrote a rejection stating (incorrectly) that no vet had examined the dog.

The solution, as far as they are concerned, is for us to visit the only vet in Calais and have him sign a new passport.  It was pointless to argue, and off we trooped.  The Calais vet had a stack of passports and filled one out, copying the details from our invalid passport.  No, he didn’t need to or want to see the dog.  No, he didn’t bother to check her microchip (we could have been asking for a passport for any dog).  No, he couldn’t accept a credit card payment – it had to be cash.  No, he would take euro’s or pounds, he didn’t mind.  Yes, he did know where the cash-point was.

So, a vet who has checked and injected the dog is rejected because even though he had signed and stamped the passport and explained why he had entered it on a different page the fact that it was on the wrong page invalidated it.  But a vet who will only accept cash, who doesn’t inspect or even see the dog, is accepted.  Madness.  Except for the sickening suspicion that the cash is never recorded and some of it finds its way back to the over-enthusiastic officials who send him so many desperate and irate customers in the first place.