AFTER YESTERDAY’S see-sawing chain of events, today has been quite straightforward, although tinged with sadness; I have departed my beloved Scotland once again — not knowing when next I’ll see it — as the first leg of the long voyage home to Melbourne played out.

It has, however, been an interesting day; something I have been dreading — ever since I began accruing bits and pieces to take back to Melbourne, some of it for me, some of it for my kids — is the need to confront the growing sense of unease at how in hell to fit everything into one suitcase.

There are two beautiful new casual shirts to go with the lovely tweed coat I bought in Glasgow; a polo shirt from Bowmore Distillery; an all-weather anorak I bought on Islay; a decorative cushion from Blenheim Castle; more stuff from the tweed shop in Glasgow; two bottles of marmalade (my nine-year-old son, Angus, is addicted to the stuff)…and about 15 190g bags of Bassett’s Jelly Babies — easily the best jelly babies on Earth — which cost £1.60 each at Sainsbury’s (as opposed to $8-$12 each on the rare occasions you can actually find them in Melbourne).

All of this is in addition to about £600 of tweed products en route to my apartment building in Melbourne by mail as we speak, along with one of my daughter’s gifts…and I’m sure there are a few items I have left out: the list is off the top of my head, rather than rifling though the suitcase to see what I’ve missed: the precise detail isn’t really that important.

Even so, one expects the problem is readily perceptible.

The good news is that I got everything in and managed to get the suitcase closed; it was new not long before the pandemic struck, so I expect it will be sturdy enough to make the trip from London to Melbourne by air intact. The bad news, however, is that the suitcase is now officially a fat bastard, weighing in at some 27.5kg (60lb) and 4kg over British Airways’ weight limit: the beautiful check-in attendant must have liked me, for she smilingly waived the £65 excess weight surcharge (and had she been based in Melbourne, I’d be taking her to a restaurant next Friday night. Truly. 🙂 )

At least Etihad allows 30kg. It charges $USD100 per surplus kilogram, and my understanding is that it’s pretty strict about enforcing it, too. But that’s not my problem, thankfully.

Leaving Scotland is always a bittersweet exercise; by this stage of a trip I am ready to go home (but paradoxically, would love to stay in Britain, too: go figure). But clambering onto one of BA’s A320s — with a bird’s eye view out the window at the Scottish countryside beyond the confines of Edinburgh Airport — tends to yank on one’s heartstrings, and hard. I don’t know when I’ll next be in Scotland (or England either, for that matter), but once again, it’s the fact I’ve been able to go there again at all that’s important.

And in a quirk of fate, I was just 80 miles from Her Majesty when she passed away at Balmoral: not the 12,000 miles away that separate Melbourne and London. I was literally just down the road.

As an aside, the A320 British Airways flew today was brand new (and by “brand new” I mean it hadn’t even done enough flights to dull the paint on the wings, or to put those black marks all over the flaps where they extend and retract). This was an A320neo (the latest updated version from Airbus) that is just beginning to appear in airline fleets around the world; it is also the exact plane Qantas has ordered 75 of to replace its ageing Boeing 737-800s. I’m a Boeing enthusiast, but this thing was so quiet and comfortable I’d be happy to see it in the livery of the flying kangaroo: and really, with the deadly early service record to date of Boeing’s 737MAX, no safety-obsessed airline like Qantas could ever have ordered it, no matter what “fixes” Boeing says it has made.

The mileage tally, when I handed my Hyundai Ioniq back to Europcar at Edinburgh Airport, was 2,145 miles: a solid effort indeed. Disconcertingly enough, those miles were undone in a flight to Heathrow that was airborne for just 49 minutes. Britain might be bigger than it looks, and the miles I’ve racked up underline the point, but it’s still small enough to fly from one end of it to the other in less than an hour.

So I am back in London; as I have previously noted, the 24-hour delay Etihad made to my return flight means I have a bonus day and two nights in London, and the fuck-up (which is what it is) that Agoda made by taking bookings on a hotel that was shut for business means I’m in a hotel at the “other” end of the Chiswick High Road: and Chiswick, the availability of accommodation permitting, is likely to be something of a stomping ground on future trips to London. Sensational spot.

I took the opportunity to return to Côte Chiswick on Turnham Green Terrace for dinner this evening — it’s the third time I’ve eaten there on this trip — partly because the first two visits were that good, and partly as I wanted to get another look at two of the dishes I’d eaten there previously (to go home and attempt to recreate them, of course). The Breton Fish Stew might take some work, but I’m good for it; but the second night I ate there, I had a smoked salmon plate that would make an excellent starter for dinner parties, now we’re heading into summer in Australia: smoked salmon, with finely sliced fennel and green apples (dressed lightly in olive oil) with pistou crème fraîche, crisped capers, finished with dill sprigs and served with toasted slices of baguette. Splendid! It shouldn’t be difficult to replicate, either.

And tonight is a night with a late bedtime, with tomorrow having no bedtime at all: as I have to be at Heathrow by 6am on Saturday for my 9am flight, I won’t sleep tomorrow: what’s the point? I have to leave my hotel by about 4.30am, which means being up anyway to get ready by 3am, which makes going to bed (at my usual time just after midnight) pointless, and fraught with the danger of sleeping through alarms. After all, there will be plenty of time to sleep on the aircraft, in jumps of six-and-a-half and thirteen hours respectively.

I’ll thus be up for a while: so long as I’m out of bed early enough to go into central London tomorrow to get the last couple of bits and bobs for my kids, that’s really my only firm commitment.

I may wander down to Trafalgar Square and peep up the mall to get an idea of the crowd outside Buckingham Palace, and potentially go and lay a bloom in tribute to Her Majesty; but I won’t be joining the queue to view her lying in state at Westminster Hall: a queue I believe is now eight miles long, and which necessitates a wait that can include an overnight component to ensure one’s place in line isn’t lost. Er…no, I think not.

And while this may sound corny, I’ve realised in the past few days I can hear music again: ever since I was a kid I could hear music in my mind, especially when happy; after certain things that happened over the past 2-3 years, I haven’t heard it at all for a long time. It’s another sign this trip has done what I’d hoped, and cleared the cobwebs away. There are better days ahead.

Life is for living, so get busy living or get busy dying. It’s a no-brainer.