“This doesn’t feel like Brisbane,” I said to myself as the QF2 Airbus landed on Australian soil earlier this morning, or was it yesterday morning? Night is day, day is night, it is all the same to me at the moment, which is why I am writing this at two-thirty in the morning, Australian time!

Well, it did not feel like Brisbane because it was Sydney, and when we arrived in Sydney, whichever hour or day it was, it happened to raining. But I didn’t mind a jot because it did not feel like winter – it was hot –  and, after nearly fourteen hours of being cramped in darkness on the packed plane, it felt great to be out in the light. I was as joyous as Henri Charriere emerging, pale and withered, into the light from his five years of solitary confinement (long haul flights always remind me of that part of the film, Papillon) and, as always, I asked of one of my fellow weary passengers:

“How do I look?”

“Fine,” they say at last, after a quizzical look from them (as if to say, “Do I know this woman well enough to tell her the truth?”).

Of course, you have to ask someone old enough to remember the film or the joke is lost.

The rain had stopped during the time it took to collect my baggage from baggage collection, work out how to use the easy secret chip in the passport identifying machine, go through customs, book the baggage onto the domestic flight, lose my paperwork, thank the airport staff profusely for troubling to chase me with my lost vital documents, make my way on the shuttle bus over to the domestic terminal, dunk my head in a sink of cold water, change clothes, put on fresh make-up, and make it, just in time, to board the internal flight bound for Brisbane; it was a beautiful sunny day.

“What lovely big seats!” I thought to myself as I boarded the smaller plane.

A little farther down the plane the seats were not quite as large. It was easy to distinguish the haggard and stooped, “in-transit” passengers from the fresh, perky, smart and jaunty regular domestic flight users. An older man wearing a powder-blue polo shirt and white shorts sat on the seat opposite mine on the aisle; and every time I turned around his brown face glowed with a sunny welcoming smile. An Indonesian lady with an Australian accent sat in the seat at the end of my row of three, and the space between us was soon amply filled by a handsome young man with tired eyes, beautiful white teeth and long muscular thighs revealed in shorts.

“That seemed an incredibly short flight,” said Aidan, after the one and a half hours it took to reach Brisbane.

And it did seem short – well it does when you are chatting to a hunky professional rugby player, even if he is only twenty-three years old. All the same I was in a tired daze as I emerged into the arrivals area and looked around for any familiar faces. As luck would have it, a very nice familiar tanned face appeared from nowhere and planted a kiss on mine.

“You look good!” Roland exaggerated heavily.

A moment or two later another tanned face smiled with the familiarity of a lifetime.

“Come on, let’s hurry to the car and avoid the parking fees,” said Bill, my eldest brother.

So we went to Bill’s and sat, drinking coffee and chatting, in the gazebo, where it was shady and an occasional breeze alleviated the increasing heat of the day. Before long my brother, Henry, joined us too…

And now it is almost another day. I wonder if I should try to catch another hour or so of sleep before greeting the sun….