From a practical no less than from a poetical point of view, the common or garden flight from London to Sydney or Melbourne via Singapore suffers from the amount of time you are actually in or over Australia before you finally land. You are already sick of the country before you set foot on it. Come in the top way, via Darwin, however, and you arrive as fresh as a daisy and convinced, as you strictly speaking ought to be, that you are still in Asia.

‘You sweet?’ our steward asked us as we were barely out of Malaysian air-space.

‘You sweet?’ is Australian stewardese for, ‘Is everything absolutely to your requirements, sir?’

We were, I thought, sweetish. ‘Perhaps another bottle of Montrose Chardonnay, Mudgee, 1984?’ I wondered.

All Australian wines are overeager, impatient to escape the confines of the bottle; but this particular Chardonnay would not sit calmly even in the glass. It sprang to your lips if you so much as nodded to your neighbour. And Trevor was pretty much the same.

He’d been very good with me, spotting me at once as the sort of passenger who appreciated being served in bulk. But he did think it was worth mentioning this time that we would be in Darwin in twenty minutes.

‘Twenty minutes?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘It feels as if we’ve just left Singapore,’ I said.

He shrugged his big broad high effeminate Australian shoulders inside his orange blazer. ‘There you are,’ he said. He seemed to be letting us in on some well-kept secret as to the real whereabouts of the Top End of Australia.

And there indeed, at a few minutes to four in the morning and with the Chardonnay still fizzing in the bottle, we were. Darwin International Airport. A single shed, as far as we could make out in the dark, constructed of aluminium and corrugated tin. There were no other planes on the runway – assuming this to be a runway that we were on – and the few ground staff we could see stood about rubbing their eyes, as if they wanted us to understand that they’d been dragged out of bed especially for us. Even in the air-conditioned cabin of the jumbo you could smell the damp warm lethargy of the tropics.

‘Look,’ Ros said, pointing to the open-mouthed passenger exit being driven slowly in our direction across the steaming tarmac, ‘it’s coming at us like a wet kiss.’

We experienced the faintest of tremors as the kiss rose and planted itself on the curved body of our craft, then we sat back and waited to be sprayed.