It was stormy weather on Friday on the Illawarra Peninsula. Big swell was smashing and spraying against the rocky headlands – like a dramatic opera. The sea – like a skilled sculptor– with its repeat pitching and retreat – forwards and backwards – has crafted intricate patterns into the stone over thousands of years. Geoff and I went for a walk along Sharkeys, Little Austi and Big Austi beaches, picking our way carefully around each headland so that we wouldn’t be swept away with the swell. Fishermen had been warned not to fish too close to the edge of the rock shelves that bookend the beaches. 

We are off to the airport very soon to make our way back to London. So strange that you can be Down Under one day and the next, in a completely different environment, on the other side of the world. Not the 140 days it took my great grandfather to sail with his wife and three small daughters from Ireland to Melbourne in the mid 1850s.

One of my favourite books is Alain De Botton’s The Art of Travel: it analyses why we are drawn to travel, as opposed to suggestions on where to go. And why train, plane and sea travel allow us to transcend the sameness of domesticity and work – tethering us like docile animals – and to gain perspective on our lives from a distance. Like an astronaut above the earth – we can see where we have come from and where we want to head to. Botton says that “Journeys are midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train…Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.”  Sometimes ordinary life, the sameness of everyday life, is suffocating and there is a need to go – somewhere else. So we can think straight again or move forward – like the journey we are on.

At home, in day to day life, if I feel hemmed in or stalled in motion, metaphorically, I put Domino in the car and we go… somewhere… anywhere, other than where I am. And the ‘going’ sets my mind in motion again and I feel more myself. I remember who I am and what I want to be.

On holiday, twice, Geoff and I decided to sell our home. Both times, thankfully, we made the right decision. Somehow away, we felt braver, more able to make big changes. I conceived Anna in Portugal and Hugo in Australia – children that I found difficult to conceive – were given to me. I decided to write a book on holiday. It is unpublished, but it was written.

Six years ago, at the end of January, Geoff rang me in Singapore during a twelve hour stopover, to tell me that my father, Stan the Man, had died. Geoff, Anna, Hugo and I had been with the family at Christmas and it was clear that Stan did not have long for this earth. Four weeks later, things had taken a turn for the worse and I jumped on a plane.

I remember everything surrounding that phone call. I had just come in from a quick swim when the phone rang. I was dripping wet and had a towel around me. I thought that is Geoff and he is going to tell me that Dad has died. He did. Somehow, being alone, in an Asian city, gave me the space to reflect clearly, in an uncluttered way, on what Dad had meant to me and as I walked the city that afternoon for hours, amongst strangers, I felt comforted.

We will arrive Singapore in time for dinner.