I was punched in the head by rowdy Man City fans during boozy trip to see Chelsea win Champions League

The next morning, the plane was still broken, and all the scheduled flights back to the UK were full, apart from easyJet, who could get one of us into Gatwick at sh*t o’clock in the ­morning.

 So we wouldn’t be going home until the next day . . . by which time our 72-hour Covid passes would have expired.

And there’s more. We’d read ­stories that the Home Office was predicting four-hour queues for people returning from abroad this summer, and airport staff claims that actually the wait would be more like ten hours.

And we really didn’t fancy doing that with out-of-date papers and the promise of either being sent back to Portugal, or despatched to a Premier Inn to hunker down with Lenny Henry for a week.

To get new Covid certification, we had to go to a test centre half an hour from the hotel, which meant I had to go in a taxi driven by a woman who was incredibly surprised every time she changed gear. And even more surprised when the traffic lights changed colour. Jerky didn’t begin to cover the net result.

To make matters worse, she was using two mobiles while driving, one as a map and one as a device for texting. 

Not since Rick ­Wakeman hung up his cloak has anyone ever operated so many keys simultaneously. 

I sat in the back of her small Renault, sweating buckets, with a car-sicky face, a hangover and a bruised head, disappointed that my luxury weekend wasn’t going quite as well as I’d hoped.

Still, after queueing for just two hours, we had taken our tests and were ready to go. But the plane was still broken.

Being men, we decided the only solution was to repair to a riverside bar and spend the afternoon drinking some more beer.

And after several hours of this, I came up with another plan which was: To charter another jet.

Before punching me in the head, the good-natured City fans had called me a “rent boy”, and to pay for this second plane it looked like I might have to become one.

Especially as the tickets for the game had cost £515 . . . each!! And that brings us on to an important point if you are ­thinking of taking a holiday abroad this summer.

You may think it’s going to be easy, because an “amber” warning is no kind of warning at all.

True. But the fact is that you have to take a test before you go — that’s £150. And then two more, when you get back. 

That’s £450, in testing alone.

FESTERING PETRI DISH

And when you get back, government agents will monitor your whereabouts, making sure you are where you said you’d be on the ridiculous box-ticking locator forms. 

Think Nazi Germany and you’re on the right track.

Is it worth it? Well Portugal is a lovely country and Porto is a beautiful city, but the fact of the matter is that it was 21 degrees over there. And it was 24 degrees when we got back to Britain, ­having landed in Birmingham at two in the morning.

Nothing wrong with Birmingham of course. Except that all our cars were 70 miles away, at the airport in Oxford.

All things considered then, I would not recommend foreign travel at the moment.

Because even with private jets and credit cards, we had all sorts of problems.

And all sorts of unforeseen expenses. And quite a lot of liver damage.

And now it turns out the ­stadium was a festering Petri dish full of virus and disease.

Still, let’s look on the bright side. Despite everything, I had a ­better time than poor old Noel and Liam Gallagher.