Prologue - Melbourne Airport.

T Plus 2 hours and 18 minutes. My countdown to launch has gone into overtime. 

At first I thought the problem was an aggrieved couple whom I'd already had to turf out of my hard-fought for (well, $30 paid for) exit row seat. They had a five month old daughter. They'd been promised a bassinet, but Qantas had over-promised and under-delivered; they had seven babies, four bassinets and two very angry parents threatening lawsuits for miscellaneous, but non-specific, consumer law breaches. And a missed departure time.

I listened in, hopefully not too overtly, as Mr and Ms Aggrieved tried to parlay their indignation into upgrades into first class, failed miserably, tried to negotiate down to business class, and failed again. The flight attendant pointed at the exit row from whence they'd initially come (and were apparently coping just fine, sans bassinet, until I turned up) and asked Aggrieved Couple if they would like him to ask my neighbours and I to move. Not bloody likely; I'd paid $30 for the seat. Though I could possibly have been persuaded to move further up the plane myself, if things became desperate. For the cause.

Alas. My sudden elevation from working class to landed (flighted?) gentry was not to be. Some other, less litigious, couple had agreed to hand over their seats - and bassinet - in return for Aggrieved Couple's. Mr Aggrieved tried to maintain the rage, insisting that a solution that involved other passengers losing their bassinet was no solution at all; that it dealt directly with his problem wasn't the point. There was a principle at stake. But as the prospect of an upgrade began to fade like a mirage on the horizon, he accepted the inevitable and disappeared further down the plane, still muttering dark threats about civil action for I'm-not-sure-exactly-what. Meanwhile the people who had sacrificed their bassinet moved to the row behind me, followed by flight attendants bearing gifts (literally) and promises that nothing would be too much trouble to make them comfortable. I think their kid is now the proud owner of a Qantas colouring book. 

Turns out, though, that Mr and Ms Aggrieved weren't causing the delay. Minutes after they had shuffled off to consider their legal options we were still firmly on the ground. Eventually the captain announced that it was something to do with a minor technical fault. Twenty minutes later the technical fault morphed into an error message. Another twenty minutes after that it was revealed it had something to do with the brakes. Oh good. I had resolved that if I didn't make it to Dubai it would be Alan Joyce's fault.

Eventually the engineers' last, best idea was to re-set the entire plane's systems in the hope the error message would go away. Like all good tech support, when all else fails you try turning it off and on again. Because that meant turning the lights off it required a somewhat anti-climactic return to the terminal, less than two hours after my triumphant, adrenaline-fuelled departure into the unknown. But it worked, and now I'm writing this over... Ballarat? Horsham? Adelaide? I don't know. I don't know what time it is either, and I'm only moderately sure of the date. Such is my life for the next seven months.

I have yet to become blasé about air travel, and I hope I never do. I just walked into a pressurised container, walked back out, walked back in again and when I complete this little hokey pokey dance in 14 hours it'll be on another continent, 10,000 kilometres away from where I started. That's a concept that was utterly preposterous in the lifetimes of people who are still alive today. It has made the world both smaller and richer, helping to extend the reach of working class scions like me into parts of the globe where not very long ago we had no business being, short of fighting a war or making a one way attempt at escaping from poverty. I do like the brakes to work, though.