2004-08-30 - 12:14 p.m.

One more week and then I�m off work for a month. I can�t describe how much this pleases me. Of course, heading off to Sydney and then Thailand is work too � oh, you wouldn�t believe how much work it really is, but you would believe how bearable, nay, enjoyable it is. Actually, it�s not like work at all. I can�t pull that line any more.

I do love to travel, though.

Actually, that�s a complete lie.

But it sounds like the kind of thing that you are supposed to say, and I drop it into conversation with virtually no guilt whenever I can. I don�t want to make waves.

Travel, like making unnecessarily posh food and completely redecorating your suburban house every other week, is at this point so universally loved that it�s difficult to imagine anyone sane daring to admit that they aren�t actually all that keen. Saying you don�t like travelling would be on a par with saying you weren�t too fussed about exhaling, or admitting to a fondness for eating small rodents. It would just be unthinkable. Imagine what people would make of you.

Admittedly, there are parts of it that I love. I like being in transit, especially when it involves being in the air. In the air, you are remote. Uncontactable. Hermetically sealed off from the world with nothing to think about except chicken or beef, red or white wine, tea or coffee.

In the air, there is consistency, no matter what nationality the airline, what language the cabin staff speak. In the air, nothing can touch you. Apart from, that is, another aeroplane, colliding with yours in a white hot flash of death-mongering metal, everyone going down into the unforgiving sea in a huge raging fireball�but I hardly ever think about that. The beef, please, I say. Vin rouge, merci. Cafe, gracias. Pretentious, watashi?

p.s. Speaking of watashi, you really should go and see Fe@r and Trembl1ng, because as an examination of cultural differences between Japan and the West, it makes Rost in Tlansration look like the ridiculous clich� that it coincidentally is.

p.p.s. I hold my unbattered hands up about the fish thing, and I doubt I will leave DL since the other site is going to be vaguely (and feel free to laugh here) professional in nature, and there�ll no place for front bottoms or pureed monkey glands there, right kids?