‘Aside from next Friday being the 170th anniversary of its first performance, what’s so significant about that piece of music?’ the narrator asked. Rhetorically, but I wanted to shout out that it was the only piece of classical music to be turned into disco for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. ‘Well, it recently left the asteroid belt on course for Jupiter . . .’

‘Voyage to the Giants’ covered the journey of the two Voyager spacecraft. Voyager I had exited the asteroid belt unscathed in September. The show took us through the two probes’ intended paths, sweeping by Jupiter and Saturn and then diverging. As well as their planetary business, each probe carried an identical golden record in case there was life out there somewhere. Ideally, life with a turntable. The records had images of Earth, a nursing mother, the Sydney Opera House, a Chinese family banquet with a red curved double door in the background, well-dressed people at a round table, laughing, and dishes piled on a lazy Susan that covered most of the white tablecloth. The audio tracks included greetings in ancient and modern languages and music from Mozart to Chuck Berry. Human life in summary, filling the auditorium with pictures and sounds before the dome above us got back to imagining the journey ahead for the two probes – Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the infinite space beyond.

I wondered if there were many machines even on Earth that could play the records. They looked like a gold version of a regular LP, but somehow had pictures on there. My picture disc of Boston’s self-titled album was in storage back in Brisbane, but that was clearly a different thing. I couldn’t understand why we hadn’t sent a photo album to space in a more regular way.

There were no more dead punks on the way back to Butterwick. They must have stayed home that day, shooting up indoors instead of out in the drizzle. Michael was focused on his toy bus again when my mother pointed out a billboard advertising The Rocky Horror Show, which was running at the King’s Road Theatre. Most of it was the cartoonish face of a shocked woman, with her black hair slicked down and parted sharply on the right, two hoop earrings in each ear and the title below in red, bleeding.

‘I’m so glad your father got us tickets to Evita and not that,’ my mother said.

They had gone to Evita when we were still at the hotel in Kensington, and the Prince Edward Theatre was fifteen minutes away by cab. London looked different then. It was all around us and we were right in the middle of it. We could walk to the Natural History Museum and Hyde Park. Every third building seemed to have a blue plaque on it – ‘Field Marshal Viscount Allenby, 1861–1936, lived here 1928–1936’, ‘Muzio Clementi, 1752–1832, composer, lived here’, ‘Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874–1936, poet, novelist and critic, lived here’. I’d studied Chesterton’s poems at school in Brisbane, and there was his plaque on the wall of 11 Warwick Gardens. Those blue plaques were like compass bearings for me in our short time in that neighbourhood. I had yet to find one in Teddington.