It is always sad to leave my Aussie family in Australia. I usually hold it together until I pass through immigration and there is no going back. I am now at Changi Airport, Singapore, at lunchtime and about to catch the next plane to Heathrow, London. I will lose 9 hours so arrive on the same day, not tomorrow.

At Sydney airport yesterday, Geoff and I settled down for a coffee by the picture windows (and our last friand –delicious almond cakes sold in Aussie cafes) to watch the majestic movement of aircraft to or away from their designated terminal bays. In the air they are powerful beasts taking docile/immobile/subservient human passengers elsewhere in the world. On the ground, they become docile/immobile/subservient and it is the humans’ turn to pull them along in vehicles and load them, fuel them, check them. Into view, from around the corner, came our gigantic A380 Airbus being towed into place. It is the largest double decker passenger aircraft in the world, seats 850 passengers and weighs a whopping 1.2 million pounds.

It is a curious fact that whilst on board – unless you are a neurotic flyer – you manage to switch off to the fact that you are thousands of miles above the earth, moving at great speed and in a freezing temperature.

Rarely do you dwell on the fact that you are whizzing through the heavens like an angel – through clouds that great artists like Michelangelo would have given his back teeth to see at close range. Instead, most of the time, you pull down the shutters and watch movies, or kip. The moving map tells you that you are going over places that you have never heard of, will never visit, all those ‘stans after India – Tajikistan/Uzbekistan/Turkmenistan – before crossing the romantic inland sea, the Caspian into the familiar territory of Europe.

Last night we checked into the Fullerton Hotel (the old, grand Post Office), right on Marina Bay, overlooking the most impressive development of a water space, in terms of breadth of vision and alacrity of build. The Marina Bay Sands is a 2,561 roomed hotel in three tall towers with a skypark perched on top like a floating boat. It also houses a casino, theatres, luxury shopping and restaurants. On the foreshore is the lotus like Arts/Science Museum. On the other side is the Merlion statue, with a lion’s head and a body of a fish, spewing out water from its mouth into the bay. It is the symbol of this young nation of a bit more than 50 years.

Geoff likes to eat the local dish, Nasi Goreng, on the terrace, rather than inside in the air conditioning and to watch the colourful movement at Clarke Quay. The hotel has a wonderful infinity pool looking over restored colonial buildings. I had a swim and decompressed. A little slice of paradise.

Paradise was shortlived. We were awoken at 2am by loud music. By 4am I worked out that it was from the room next door. We called the front desk and they sent the duty manager. The guest next door had checked out late the night before and had left the radio blaring. They gave us a complimentary limousine ride to the airport to make up for the disruption.

As we were leaving a cavalcade of motorbikes with flashing blue lights passed us. The driver told us it was the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, from the People’s Action Party. His father was the first PM from independence in 1959 to 1990. There are other political parties, but they never get voted in.

The chauffeur finally answered the question Geoff always asks the local taxi drivers. Where is Brizay Park – where he lived in 1955-1958? He told him that it was an affluent area with freehold bungalows about 9kms from downtown. Single abodes are rare in the CBD. The mystery solved.

Next stop London.

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.