Singapore airport at 5.23 am, I can reveal, resembles every other airport I've been in at any time of day you care to choose, except that I can't shop for Gucci and Rolex because the duty free shops (catering exclusively for the stupendously rich) are closed. It does have free internet access until 6 am though, so fair play to it.

My last few days in Oz were pretty low key; I drove up the coast to the Sunshine Coast, a kind of retirement-home mirror image of the Gold Coast. Less ostentation, older people but otherwise much the same, and consequently not entirely enthralling. Still, I spent an enjoyable few hours wandering around and reading1 on the beach.

Actually, scratch "pretty low key". On Wednesday night, Chris and I went whoring, as his affectionate term for crawling round strip bars goes. I'd never been to one of these places before (and I'm twenty five - talk about late starter) and it was a bit of an anticlimax really, although I suspect we weren't really pushing the upper limits of class for Brisbane's adult entertainment venues. It was pretty odd - each time we rocked up in a new place, the novelty wore off in about ten minutes, and after that we might as well have been in any other marginally seedy, squelchy-underfoot bar you care to imagine. Minus the naked young ladies, obviously, but there you go. We did meet a garrulous lawyer called Mel (hi Mel, sorry we ran away from you) who proceeded to latch on to us (hi Chris, cheers for inviting him along :). He decided to buy me a green, $29 cocktail - presumably, my pretty far-gone state wasn't far gone enough for his liking - which I choked back. Next bizarre drinking buddy was a goateed maniac called Patrick, who gave me a cigarette and pushed me over the nutter threshold for the evening. I grabbed Chris and we buggered off as fast as the cabbie would take us. Lucky to get out of that one alive, I reckon.

My inevitable boak the next morning was green.

So, after feeling absolutely bloody dreadful for most of today (yesterday?), I'm on the way home.

1. at last count, I've scythed through two Christopher Brookmyre books, Dead Air and Espedair Street (Iain Banks), Fury (Salman Rushdie) and a whopping two chapters of Joyce's Ulysses, which is the most unimaginably obtuse book I've ever tried to read.