The flight. You never really get used to it. It’s around 13 hours to Singapore and another five to Perth, 17 hours altogether plus however long in Singapore Airport. Too much time to think.
Heathrow is a nightmare. You get there three and a half hours before the flight, thinking secretly don’t be silly, but boy you need it. I have a laptop inside a bag inside another bag that has to come out of both bags each time we go through security, and I’m so preoccupied with packing it all back together again and trying to work whether or not I should ‘declare’ my miniature bottle of contact lens solution I part company completely with the plastic bag I acquired with the newspaper I bought, into which I had temporarily (and stupidly) stuffed all my travel documents, passport included. I go back through the shoe scanner and I can’t identify the security desk I’d been through, but I do recognise the bald security guy, and thank God there it still is. By the time I’m on board I’m already exhausted.
Going to Australia is not such an amazing adventure because I have been there before. In fact it’s 39 years almost to the day since I first set foot in the country as a ‘ten pound Pom’ as we used to be called, back in the late sixties, since that is all it cost us to get there. It’s amazing to think that so recently Australia actually paid people to migrate there, and not just those who could do useful jobs. I was an actress then, good heavens, who needs them? I’ve been back several times since – eight times in the last five years to be precise – but each time I’ve needed a visa, and I can only stay a limited time and I can’t work or buy property, despite the fact that my Australian ancestry goes back to 1801, which doesn’t sound much, but by Australian standards that is a Very Long Time.
I’m partly going back for that reason, to investigate my family history. Family history is not something that interests anyone under the age of fifty, it would seem, which is perhaps why I haven’t taken much notice of mine until recently. I don’t yet know much about my ancestress, except that she went out there as a widow, in her fifties, with five children, and there was some connection with Lord Nelson, and that’s about it.
That is my excuse for going. You have to have an excuse to do these things, or I do, or at least a reason, a motivation – otherwise what am I going to do when I’m there? Of course I have friends there, and relatives, and my only brother, who lives in Wagga Wagga. There’s another reason for going which I may or may probably not go into later.
I get stomach cramps on long flights. I thought it was all the sitting and the eating, but I’m told it’s to do with the pressure. On one long-haul flight my glasses came apart. The cabin staff kindly gave me a sewing kit to sew them back together and explained it was the vibration of the plane that loosened the screws. It was a Qantas flight so I’m not at all sure if they were ribbing me or not, but it conjured up a wonderful picture of rows of passengers sitting there while the lenses of their spectacles dropped off one by one – plop plop plop. And what else might fall apart? Fillings? False teeth? False hair? Other false bits? Goodness me we’d all be clambering off the plane with half of us missing, and what a sight that would be.
On one flight (Qantas again), a member of the cabin staff came up to us and said if we could solve this riddle we would win a bottle of champagne. He had the champagne in his hand at the time and was using it as a cricket bat, which I thought probably meant it would explode before we got the answer.:
‘A man arrives out of the blue in Sydney Harbour, literally drops from the sky, naked as the day he was born, no ID and he doesn’t speak the language. How does anyone know who he is?’ (Okay, you’ve heard it before.) We were flummoxed. He kept coming back to give us clues, we still couldn’t get it. ‘Naked,’ he kept saying, ‘think about it … belly button … ‘ ‘Ah! Adam!’ I won the champagne. And it was the real thing, not the sparkling stuff that Aussies still insist on calling champagne.
There was another flight I was on – this time it was Virgin Blue, travelling from Perth to Sydney overnight. We were woken at around 5pm by a horrifically cheery announcement: ‘Good morning ladies and gents. We will shortly be arriving at Darwin Airport. Don’t be alarmed, but due to adverse weather conditions all flights to Sydney are being diverted to Darwin. Buses will be waiting outside the terminal to transport you to your destination.’ For those who don’t know, Darwin is 4300 kilometres from Sydney, a three or four day bus ride.
We all nodded and smiled and thought ‘Oh yeah’. And they repeated it. Twice. On the third occasion they said: ‘The time at our destination is oh six hundred hours and the date is April 1st’.
Goodonya Virgin Blue, and good night.
