Over the next three days we’re holding our company-wide LLP Group ‘consulting’ weekend in Visegrad in Hungary, in a spa hotel overlooking the Danube, just where the river bends down towards Budapest from the Slovak border. We have these conferences once a year. They’re expensive in terms of direct costs and opportunity costs, but they’re educational and they’re good for morale. The drinks are on us.

My colleagues are coming from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania and Luxembourg. Those travelling far are flying, but most of us are travelling by car, crossing as many borders as we must. Four of us made the journey yesterday, and it took eight hours to get from Prague to Visegrad. Two hours too many, but not, in fact, because borders have become more difficult, but because of a minor accident involving some trucks and a huge traffic jam. In 23 years of travelling on the dreadful Prague to Bratislava highway I can remember only a few occasions when the road was clear from one end to the other.

We were apprehensive that the closing of some Schengen borders in response to the refugee crisis might delay our journey, but we crossed the border between Slovakia and Hungary without delay. Only the long queue of cars and trucks crossing from Slovakia to Austria was a reminder of the reversion to the old restrictions on travel.

It’s depressing that after so many years of free movement borders are being closed in Europe. That we have taken open borders for granted for years now has never been more clear than during these temporary inconveniences. Perhaps we’ve already seen Europe at its most open, and won’t be criss-crossing as easily again for a lifetime or two.

A Belorussian colleague dared not travel at all, since his passport is currently with the British Consular authorities in Warsaw awaiting the granting of a British visa. These were the kind of inconveniences I thought we’d long ago put to rest.

The real border, of course, is the Schengen one, and the worst border is the one between Serbia and Hungary. Refugees/migrants are massing in ever greater numbers and trouble is inevitable. Indeed, yesterday there was tear gas. Let’s hope that tomorrow there aren’t bullets.

I sympathise with Hungary. Perhaps no one at the EU’s top tables took the problem seriously enough when there was time to do something about it – properly to finance and accommodate an orderly and humane acceptance of migrants arriving at the borders, and to ease their travel to safe havens all over Europe.

But Hungary’s policy of prevention, will surely not work, neither for Hungary in the long term, nor for the EU.