'I'm going to have an adventure'

At the beginning of any journey it's good to meet a signpost - especially a living one. Sitting in Heathrow, Terminal 3, on Tuesday and waiting for my flight to board at the beginning of a six-week round-the-world trip, I noticed an elderly woman in a bright pink floral dress looking with growing bewilderment at a mobile phone. I know what you're thinking: 'when did you ever look at one without bewilderment?' But I had to offer help. I showed her how to store a number and to send a message, explaining that I generally found pressing buttons at random a good way to find out what these things did. I asked where she was going: Delhi to visit her son and 'have an adventure'. When I told her my plane was heading for Singapore and then to Australia, she really got going. She'd been born in Singapore, could still recall the bird song and the colours. It all stopped as the Japanese approached and she and her mother got aboard a final ship escaping from the harbour, leaving her father to perish on the Burma railway. They sailed back to a blitzed  England with the parents on board worried about U boats all the way. It was beginning to sound like the opening episode of Tenko. But by now my flight had been called and it was time for us to part to our seperate adventures.

The flight hurried me through time-zones, mostly at night. An abbreviated Ash Wednesday around a change of planes in Singapore, then on to Sydney. I was met by Leigh, a friend from over 30 years ago in Tonga, an economist who has always said (and now I believe him) that the rest of the world has got it wrong. He lives in Queanbeyan, near Canberra, but he wanted me to see Sydney first. We had breakfast with Leigh's daughter, Evelyn, petite (like her Philippino mother) and married to (I think this is the technical term) a hunk - a naval diver on the verge of joining the commandos and with the tightest handshake I come across for years. She gave us instructions for the day in the way daughters do (sub text: I know you're getting old so I'll say this very slowly) and we were off: the Manly ferry through the harbour to the Opera House (photos from every angle) and bridge (later walked across), new panama hat coming into its own. I was beginning to wilt, but Leigh was determined I should meet as many relatives as possible: brother Ken in his legal office in central Sydney and mother Joyce in her home in Caringbah. And then the three-hour drive towards Canberra trhough an amazingly green Australian landscape. Last time I was here all was drought-ridden, brown and dust; now, if not exactly an Irish green it was at least refreshed.

More soon.