A past full of landmines and safety cards

It's cold where I am. Cold enough that random strangers feel the embedded need to tell me it's cold. Embedded in their routine, they don't stray from strict caricature, and I don't see them enough to flesh them out into 3D forms. They exist in anecdote, a fleeting moment stripping them of richness, and reducing them to, say, woman in grey coat, who tells me it's cold. She then gets on the bus and I'll never see her again, unless of course it's hot the following day, and she'll emerge with hankie on head to perchance mention it's warm. I saw an air-stewardess at Manchester Airport passing me by once. She walked in a perplexing way. Her upper body was perpetually moving, animated, swinging arms, taking orders, giving orders, her mouth never halting. However, her legs were moving like an old woman. For all her animation, it took her about an hour to get across a small stretch of airport. She was also ridiculously gorgeous, a mane of blonde hair cascading across her uniform like some character from the a romance novel, for a change was drawn well. I knew she was beautiful because the guy across from me, a sort of Nudge from Hey Dad a like when Hey Dad was a fond nostalgic memory and not a cesspool of disgust, was hypnotised. I don't know he she saw him looking, but he was entranced, he watched her arms swings, her legs barely move, he might even have let some burger dribble onto his jeans, his eyes were wide with wedding plans...and just like that, they were all gone. She finally made it across the airport, he went back to his book, and I went back to listening to badly compiled mix tapes with endings and starts all a jumble. The thing was, this entire movement of eye to stewardess took what, 1ne minute - theres members of my family I don't feel I know as well. And I could have could it all wrong, sketched these strangers wrongly, judged their movements incorrectly. It frustrates me sometimes I can see these interactions and then they pass - like how we used to blow dandelions in the wind and watch the petals scatter onto the horizon. My Dad was with me on that flight, and he just remembers how delicious the bacon sandwiches were. I try and engage on whether that trip to Manchester had any consequence to him since it was an exciting adventure. I mean, remember, you drank with the New Zealand Cricket Team, remember the belly dance...no, bacon sandwiches. Fine. Guess I got this observational detail from Mum then...

I can't really remember whether anything I did in London had consequence or not to be honest. If it involved more than a cute story or too, I'd have felt it by now. Sure, I had to vote from the Gothic weirdness of the Andaz hotel, trying to convince a camp Arab guy from reception that it was possible to fax Tasmania and yes it was a real place, but there was a faint air of dis-satisfaction that gnawed at me all weekend. Even at somewhere as grandiose as the Tower of London, I was more distracted by a noisy group of Bosnians than any rich and rewarding conversation. I felt fitful. It's hard to explain, and yet at the same time it's very easy. There's a girl I used to like, and every time I have drinks I espouse her name as if I'm going to do something about, even though the ship has not just sailed, but it's been sunk, retrieved, and then sunk again once it's been fossicked for scrap metal and historical purposes. And yes, when I'm drunk, it comes up again...I wish I could stop. There's a Japanese guy at the Tower of London - he's part of a crew of strange orange jacket wearing Japanese people, clad in the same garment, muttering around the edges of the Yeoman Warders speech about Anne Boleyn. I know I'm at least in 1ne of his photos because he apologized, shooting over his shoulder to take his girlfriend standing in front of a big spear while I shuffled around in the background in a Bangles T-shirt trying to not giggle at one amusingly named torture implement. And all weekend I weighed up in my mind whether, when he prints that picture, I'm smiling because of the amusingly named torture implement or frowning because through a hangover haze I realise I've just talked the same rubbish I always talk and must be a crashing bore after all this time. I guess I'll never know unless I accidentally find myself on a Japanese Facebook page, pondering why I had that expression on my face. The Noisy Bosnians have a much better, less stressful, more youthful day than I had. They neither drank mulled wine nor had any kind of angst. In fact, such was their joi de vivre, I imagine that it was all forced somehow, a strange contrast to my own sulkiness. As it happened, my mood was picked up somewhat by a Japanese girl and a Pret A Manger sandwich, but that's possibly too boring a story to expand...I think in her picture, I'm smiling? Can't be sure...

Stansted Airport isn't the airport for lovers of fine architecture. A sort of homeless vagrant had paced up and down the train for a bit, being hassled by security for his own failure to distinguish one train station called Stansted from another. Up the alleyway, up the escalator, bag sprawled smugly across my bronzed (ha) shoulders, I knew my airport, I had been here before, I was ready, a traveller on the move. I casually adjusted my watch, and sat at an Internet cubicle to kill some time. A Facebook popped up on the screen from the girl I used to like, but I ignored it. Not out of spite, but because the flinty flickering screen would eat my words and make me sound like, well, someone who couldn't tell 1ne part of Stansted from the other. A hassled looking couple were bickering next to me endlessly. She was blonde, in a camel coat that made her look like a detective or something, and he was French I think. They couldn't cope with the complicated interface of keyboard and booking system and were in danger of missing their flight, not to mention the complicated interface of pound coin to slot. Oh to be young and innocent as a traveller again, to feel as through such things were marriage breaking hassles. I decided to intervene to stop the small child next to me hearing such filthy language. I pressed a pound coin of my own money into their internet kiosk slot, flicked the buttons to help them print off their boarding card, and solved their problems under a disgustingly broken Stansted Airport light and next to a kid pumping out some JLS on his IPOD just to get away from the swearing and the angst...yes, I was feeling good, I didn't care what I had said in a drunken state, about anything angst related, in fact, I was a healer, a repairer of marriages, an experienced international traveller with wisdom to pass on. At least, I strolled around the corner, looked in my bag, realised i must have left my own printed out boarding pass on 1ne of the freaky spiral desks at the Andaz, and had to make my own trek all the way back round to where the couple were just finishing up their boarding. They kindly offered me my pound back, and it was lucky the little boy had his IPOD in, lest he hear several words that in days of yore would have got me thrown in the Tower of London...

It was cold on my flight from London to Glasgow. I know it was cold because the air-stewardess - not breathtakingly gorgeous on RyanAir, it would blow the budget - decided to use it as break the ice small talk. I have a horrible nightmare that 1ne day I'm going to be on a budget airline that gets the passengers involved in some sort of mid flight game...duck duck goose or something horrendous. The head stewardess is fierce of face, a sort of older, broken in head stewardess, ground down by routine and constant RyanAir flights hither and tither. She's terse, her tea pouring skills generally slapdash. I felt bad staring at her and waiting for outbursts. My own at work demeanour could do with a touch up probably, and I don't even make tea for Little Englanders slapping the front of their Suns and speaking proudly of their hopes for David Cameron. I said to my friend when I left Melbourne how odd it was that Virgin Blue play Kate Miller Heidkes "Last Day On Earth" just as the plane takes off in a rather disturbing juxtaposition of song title and potential disaster, but here, I'm sitting on my own, and any whimsical observation about the James Nesbitt voice over that pipes through the plane 6ix times a flight would be lost on the Little Englanders sitting next to me. The wife is a sort of Pat Butcher from Eastenders blonde bouffant headbutt (yeah! yeah!...no one gets that...) clinging old woman with a botox forehead, her husband a living breathing Jeremy Kyle visiting caricature of a man who says what he likes and likes what he says. Mid flight, she pretends to fall asleep. I know she's pretending because she keeps turning away from him and looking at me, but any time he presses her on the shoulder, her eyes clasp tight. Her husband instead engages the man in the row next to him in political debate, and she looks at me like the weariest woman in the world. I am, as it happens, no help to her. Not politically minded, and not particularly awake to offer a re-assuring glance. I read my Bill Walsh book from cover to cover and didn't even tell her she'd soon land at an airport with tartan "bunnets" painted on the toilet doors, the phrase Pure Dead Brilliant painted in a purple mantra across the walls, and some of the most incomprehensible wee men doddering about an airport you could ever hope to find...

She'd have to find that out for herself...