Day One: London

 The most urgent requirement to fill is hydration. Hydrate now. Hydrate well. Throw in some Metamucil into the mix as over the 40 hours of travel, all you've managed is the odd fart. 

The next most urgent requirement is sleep, which now that you're ensconced in your hotel room, cranking up the air conditioning, items set to charge, bag contents exploded around the room, you can consider. In the 40 hours of travel, you've had patches of sleep, trying to work out the best way to get over jet lag seeing you've gone around the world. It's only when you lay your head on the pillow in London to you allow yourself to take the tab of Stillnox at around 10 pm local time. You sleep through until 6.30 a.m. You sleep that wonderful, heavy, dreamless sleep. Hopefully this is a good omen. I feel refreshed. 

In the last 40 hours, you've seen some of the best and worst in people. 

The worst - the Karen sitting in front of you on the leg between Melbourne and Sydney who refused to turn her phone off and had a stand-up barney with the head flight attendant half-way up. I could see in his mind him wishing he had the opportunity to have her go sit out on the wing and think about her actions. 

You've worked out that Qantas are really okay. The flight from Sydney to Los Angeles was uneventful. I was lucky enough to have a lovely older woman next to me. She was from San Francisco - lived a very full live, and she has no idea how the country has got to where it is. She goes to protests. She writes letters. She's great fun. We swapped numbers at the end of the flight. 

My only gripe was I had to take the pasta option for dinner as the other choices had gone. Tepid tortellini is not great. Breakfast was better. First world problems. 

Then there was seven hours in Los Angeles. 

Two hours of this was spent in the immigration queue. Months of catastrophising ended up with a conversation that went like this:

"You're in transit."

"Yes."

"Look at the camera."

"Glasses off?"

"Keep them on."

"Put your hand on the scanner." (Fingerprints - joy)

The man passed me back my documents and bid me a nice day. 

I'd been in the States for two hours by now. 

After this my luggage was collected and sent to the onwards flight section. 

Then there was the wait for the shuttle bus to the hotel, where I'd booked a room for a few hours. 

Then there was another queue to check in at the hotel. 

For USD$100 I got a room for an hour and a half, and one of the best showers I've ever had in my life. 

Then I waited for the shuttle bus, went back to the airport, and had a remarkably pleasant interaction with the immigration office on the other end. He was lovely. Not so lovely was Kristy Noem's talking head on the screens around the airport. 

A visit to Starbucks for some kind of pumpkin spice concoction and a bagel. Someday, somebody will explain to me this pumpkin spice phenomenon. It just seems like they overload the drink with a syrup made of cinnamon, nutmeg and dread. 

Of my seven-hour transit stop in Los Angeles, I spent about three of those hours in some sort of queue. There were opportunities to improve customer service. Not enough service staff, immigration officers, desk clerks. And nobody really appeared that happy. 

The ten-hour flight to London was uneventful. Flying over Greenland was very cool. Sleep evaded me, which may work in my favour. With no sleep, hopefully I'll regulate to European time more easily this way. 

Immigration in London was another thing entirely. It's brilliant. Step off the plane, go to the gate, your passport, smile for the camera and you're in. Collect your bag from the turnstile, make your way to the Heathrow Express, then get on the Bakerloo at Paddington, getting off at Lambeth North. 

Then getting out of the station, the exhaustion kicked in. It was raining. I could make head nor tail of the way Googlemaps was telling me to go. My feet were hurting. And rather than despair, I hailed an Uber to take me the 5-minute drive to my hotel. In other times, I would have had an abject feeling if failure. This time, I made the good choice of spending the money to get myself to a bed. 

And now it's time to get out there and have a wander. There's so many things I would love to do. The V&A. The new V&A storeroom. Westminster Abbey. The National Gallery. The Tate Modern... endless opportunities, but no time. 

Front of mind for me is getting myself to Farringdon Station to get the train up to St Alban, where I'll be spending the next two nights with friends. I think I've got my head around the route.

But generally, I'm happy and I feel like I'm home. Can't ask for much more than that. 

Today's song: