*Insert cheesy 'back home again' type song lyric here*

I had an enthusiastic welcome from the dogs. I've eaten some vegemite. I've made a coffee using my beloved espresso machine. (Not for me, for Demelza. I'm off to bed).

The journey home was ok, it was never going to be fabulous. Leaving on Tuesday to arrive on Thursday just feels wrong. Major hiccup at Singapore, where British Airways had some difficulty refuelling the plane. This was announced after we had had the scheduled 40 minutes leg stretching/shopping in the terminal and the crew had changed over, and we had returned to the plane. I gather they would normally have kept us all on the plane, but it was unbearably hot down the back in cattle class (does anyone know why the airconditioning never seems to work until you're in the air?) and after giving out some water to drink, they finally arranged for access to the terminal again. Thank goodness, because the eventual delay was three hours! I discovered that the food outlets will take a variety of currency, but for everything other than Singapore dollars, they round everything up to whole dollars (or pounds, etc).

I had an amazing view of Sydney harbour from my window seat, and it was a beautiful, clear sunny morning. This went some way to making up for the lack of access to the toilet for most of the previous 6 hours, when the two people in my row took sleeping tablets and zonked right out. I prefer to share with people who get up for a bit of leg stretching every couple of hours, like the couple who sat there on the London to Singapore leg.

Catching my non-refundable flight back to Canberra turned out to be a very near thing. We landed at 9:20, took at least 15 minutes just to get off the plane. By the time my enormous overweight purple suitcase came out almost last, and I cleared customs, raced down to the train station, waited 11 minutes for the next train, got to Domestic, and sprinted up to the Rex counter, it was 10:24 for a 10:35 flight. There was only one person in the queue, who smartly got out of the way of me and my purple monstrosity as he remarked 'hey, are you in a hurry?' Helpfully the Rex plane was running ten minutes late, or I might have been on a bus right now.

Anyway, enough of this boring stuff. There's still a lot more to tell from the my last week in the UK, which I'll catch up on ASAP.