Met Phil at lunchtime, and he was even surprised I had a coke! Tsk! I don't always drink - and I've had like way too much alcohol recently. Some of it I've even paid for :p !!

Left work at 3:30pm. And some of them still wondered if I was going to come back! Well, and especially given some of the discussions I had yesterday, the only way I'll not come back is if the plane crashes. And it hasn't yet!

Bus (139) was about 10mins late but I'd given myself just under an hour to get into Birmingham city centre so it wasn't a problem. Got the train fine, but it was a little slow through to Dorridge as it was stuck behind a slower-moving train which couldn't get out of the way. Reached Reading about 20mins late, so ended up catching a later Rail-Air coach than I had anticipated. I was supposed to check in at around 7:30pm at Heathrow - was I going to make it in time?!

The Rail-Air coach was incredibly popular - there must have been ooh all of 6 people on it! It took about 30-35mins to reach Terminal 1, then it moved on to Terminal 3. The coaches don't go to Terminal 4 (where I needed to be), so we got a free cross-terminal transfer coach from T3. And it was a lot longer than I realised; it seemed to take an age, but then I suppose it had to go round the perimeter, and couldn't obviously cut directly through the airport.

It is at this point that things get rather vague and messy. Timings, which in the airline industry are so vitally important, should be strictly kept and every minute accounted for. Organisation and structure should be easily accountable and visible. Mhrnkle.

Upon arrival in T4's departure lounge it became acutely apparent that such organisation is not always to be expected. There were people everywhere, queues for check-in stretching back a lot further than they ought to have, and which after a while all seemed to merge into one. My flight on the computer screens says "Please wait", despite the fact I should have checked in 15 minutes prior to the time I arrived, which meant that I didn't have a clue which gaggle of people I should be trying to latch on to. Wherever people stood was always in the way of other people walking through. And the staff present were all seemingly in a state of panic and made headless chickens appear paralysed.

Eventually the check-in desk range was put on the board - now to find the queue! If in doubt - ask - but of course most of the would-be passengers didn't know either! People even asked me LOL! We needed desks 31-42; when the queue finally settled down it was so long and snaked around so much that at one point wove in front desks numbered in the 70s!!

I ended up queueing between a chatty middle-aged couple in front of me, going to Melbourne but via Bangkok, and a young female student flanked by her parents who was going to Darwin. The chaos went on all around us but, like good English people that we all were, we didn't complain, we just made some humorous comments about it all, and acted like it was normal.

We were in the queue for over an hour and a half. The staff looking after the front of the queue were getting worried and commenting that the flight might have to be held up.

We made it through eventually; although I'd asked for an aisle seat I ended up with the very last window seat. The seat next to me apparently was free but probably wouldn't stay that way!

Went through security etc., wasn't supposed to have too long before boarding so quickly popped into a duty free shop for a present for Lisa (typically English - hmmm a box of toffees in a tin shaped like a London bus!!). Then went to join the crowd at the boarding gate, which was just as manic. Technically speaking, there were two queues - one for first/business class, one for the rest of us, but this seems to have been largely ignored. Organisation was pretty minimal, and no-one really cared anyone.

While waiting, who should come up behind me but the student I was queueing with! And guess what - she'd been given the seat next to me!

Despite being one of the last to check in, we seemed to be one of the first on board. However it took so long for everyone to come through the airport that we ended up taking off around midnight - some two hours late! They did give a PA announcement about it though on the plane, apparently some kind of shift changeover of Heathrow Airport staff hadn't gone smoothly. Our baggage was loaded onto the plane a while after the plane was full of passengers!

Anyway. The flight itself (just under twelve hours to Singapore) wasn't actually too bad - I was expecting it to feel a lot worse. Before take-off me and the student had talked a bit - she was visiting her sister and spending ten weeks in Oz before starting her final year at Swansea Uni (she lived in Watford). She read a bit of my story too (Louise), and said she quite liked it and wondered if I'd ever publish it. Eventually however we did our own thing - in her case that seemed to be sleep! I wrote a bit of my story, had a couple of naps, walked around for about 45mins, and watched the flight map as we flew! Played a couple of onscreen games and listened to some music, including Diana Krall in concert in Paris.

Arrived about 7pm local time in Singapore, nice flight over the waterways, fairly scenic and a smooth and pleasant approach, almost calming. The flight stopped here to refuel, and also lots of people changed planes here (including the student next to me). We weren't sure at first how long we'd be staying, but it was suggested it would be about an hour. I had a wander round the terminal, but didn't do a lot else. It was more good just to be moving around!

Both on the Singapore and Melbourne flights, the airline food was nothing particularly special - purely sustenance fayre; the sort of thing you'd find in (futuristic) (military) dictatorships in literature and on TV to keep the people fed but bored and under control. Hmm maybe that's an idea to stop air rage - drug the food! Meh.

To replace the student on the Melbourne leg we had a Singaporean citizen, but he disappeared after half an hour to sit with friends of his elsewhere on board.

Am I excited yet? No. Maybe I will be once I reach Brisbane. I'm becoming an emotional vacuum!

Hadn't seen much daylight on Saturday, bit of an odd concept of a day really!!

Thought for the say - does a box of toffees count as food for the purposes of customs declaration? And would airline food?! LOL!