I’m a skeptic about frequent flyer points anyway. When Ansett collapsed in late 2001 I lost 58000 points in my private account, mostly through use of my diners club card as main credit card.

So when I was trying to get some points from Qantas over my emirates flights to Italy, I was hoping that there might be something, but I was not holding my breath. Today I got an email that I am not eligible for any points for those flights.

Totally OK. But why suggest people are eligible for any points with global partners then? Part of all those alliances is not having to bother carrying a squillion different loyalty cards.

Which means Qantas has just lost credibility with me. Big time.

I’m conservative and I still call it Ayers Rock. I visited it in 2005 and my heart skipped a beat when I first saw it.

But did I try to climb it? No way! Aside from the fact I am not some sort of insane mountaineering type, there were signs all over the place from the traditional owners asking very nicely for people to respect their feelings and beliefs and to not climb it.

As Dale Carnegie might say, saying please can get you a long way.

After reading the signs, I was more than happy to both follow my own non adventurous instincts and to comply with the wishes of the owners and not climb it.

When I read some of the self absorbed views and see the photos in the attached article about some of the Instagram influencers and such people, I am just taken with how shallow they are. Who needs to be warned about the risks when the hosts are telling you very politely that it is dangerous and they don’t want you to get hurt and they don’t want you to hurt their feelings? Doing handstands on top of the rock is so insensitive.

https://www.news.com.au/travel/australian-holidays/northern-territory/influencers-reason-for-deciding-to-climb-uluru-before-the-ban/news-story/b53928ee54800a6070bc0670b1679356

You know, of my contemporaries, I’ve never met a St Kevin’s old boy whom I liked, to borrow from Wil Rodgers.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/school-life/st-kevins-college-students-caught-chanting-offensive-lyrics-on-melbourne-tram/news-story/06d056348a763898a83b8da6a0636dea

This latest news report about their behaviour just confirms my views about most people who attend that school. Privileged and self entitled spoilt prats….

I just looked outside in the glooming dusk and saw a bright star moving fast, and silently.

I assume it was the international space station in low earth orbit. It moved too fast to be a star, and too high and quiet to be a plane.

We don’t get excited about satellites anymore. We take them for granted – assuming we actually look at the night sky at all.

But I remember as a small child in the early 70s, sitting outside our home in the backyard with my parents, when my father would point at a fast moving star with almost child like delight and say that was a satellite.

We used to look for those things, and we used to marvel at them. Now… we live in a time when even the many miracles of science bore us.

Nothing is enchanted anymore, and they might be why so many among us love the savage desensitised violence and amorality of Game of Thrones. Peaceful life bores us, even when it is amazing.

Footnote – my parents lived through the Second World War as witnesses to the fighting in their villages. Something like a satellite would have seemed a happy miracle to them in comparison to that.

It’s about 1am and I’m in Dubai waiting for a connecting flight. Aside from the temples of material excess which are the duty free stores, there is even a Hard Rock Cafe in the terminal, and some guy with a guitar doing a performance not too far from that. This is way over the top and a little surreal. All I want is to get home.

Why, with over a million people of Italian background in Australia, doesn’t Qantas introduce a long haul non stop flight to Rome? That would shave many hours off my ordeal. This return journey also stops at Singapore, and I am unable to sleep sitting up so it will be quite an ordeal for me.

During the past month of rail travel between cities, I often heard announcements about whether the train I was on was running on time or late (the announcement usually said it was running on time) and that was so unusual to my ears that it reminded me of the infamous saying about Mussolini making the trains run on time.

The origin of the myth about Mussolini and the trains running on time was recounted in Martin Gilbert’s History of the 20th Century. When, after the match on Rome, the king summoned Mussolini to form a new government, the train wanted to wait. He insisted that it leave immediately, and said something along the lines of “From now on, the trains run on time.” He was overheard by the wife of the British ambassador, who then shared this anecdote.

There you have it. I expect that myth is why there are all these announcements about whether the train is on time. Italians can’t help but play up to it.

I’m about 28 hours from the start of my journey home and I am feeling pretty homesick now. There are a lot of things I miss. Aside from the obvious – ie my family, friends and my own home, here are some of the less obvious things that I take for granted:

Speaking English: after my first week, which was partly spent at a cultural conference in Cosenza with some other Australians, I have been speaking Italian constantly to the point where sometimes I am thinking in Italian.

The Night Sky: in Bologna I looked up at the stars and they were unfamiliar and I felt the first pangs of homesickness.

Doing Laundry at Home: I’ve been doing laundry in my hotel room, using a bottle of unfamiliar lavender scented washing detergent I bought in my first week here. I am sick of the unfamiliar scent and can hardly wait to get back to using cheap Aldi laundry detergent in my own washing machine.

Supermarkets: I really miss Coles and Woolworths and even Aldi, the supermarkets here just seem so different with different brands and names in Italian.

Thai food: I’m a regular at my local Thai restaurant and I miss eating there a whole lot right now.

Usual TV programming: I don’t own a TV anymore, but I do stream some stuff on my iMac when I can be bothered. In my hotel I can enjoy either Italian news or dubbed versions of NCIS or CSI constantly- shows I don’t bother watching in English.

Myki: I have been taking a lot of public transport in the cities I have visited and I miss using my myki to hop on the bus or tram or train in Melbourne.

The Herald Sun: ever since childhood I’ve been a reader of the herald and the sun, and their successor paper rather than the more highbrow Age. I don’t buy it that often anymore, but almost a month away reminds me how much I enjoy its shallow dogmatic reporting.

Gardening: I need to get out there and plant my tomatoes and do a whole lot of urgent digging and mowing when I get home.

On the other hand, I don’t miss work – except for all my friends in the office. I could quite happily retire right now and not feel the slightest pang about the rat race.

When I get back to my home after this long away, it will seem a little different and unfamiliar and that will make it seem a little more interesting for a while.

One conspiracy theory I will not entertain, even in jest, is the Shakespeare authorship question. The original advocate for someone else being the author died in a lunatic asylum (Delia Bacon) and an early advocate for the Earl of Oxford was an eccentric unfortunately but perhaps approximately named Looney.

What saddens and appalls me is that some of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the past half century have subscribed to such theories. Among them is Sir Kenneth Branagh, whose Henry V thirty years ago was just the first of at least 5 films of the plays he was involved with.

http://www.to-be-or-not-to-be.com/william-shakespeare-authorship-2.htm

On the plane over to Italy, unable to sleep, I saw a lot of films. One of them, All Is True, stars Sir Kenneth Branagh as Shakespeare on his retirement and uneasy resumption of family life in Stratford. The film addresses various questions about the life of Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre in a way which asserts Shakespeare to undoubtedly be the author.

Branagh is an actor, and actors deal in make believe. But does this depiction mean he has abandoned the Oxford authorship tomfoolery? I hope so.

I like to stir people up by being provocative. I get ample ammunition from my frequent purchases of ‘alternative news’ publications (ie the looney conspiracy stuff about UFOs, vaccinations, Chem trails, 9/11, Obama’s citizenship etc).

For example, this past July during the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, I was calling it the ‘moon hoax’. And I don’t like needles so I am quite comfortable being irresponsible and saying that I am an anti-vaxxer, although I think most of my shots, flu aside, are up to date. (You can tell I am not a parent.)

But I think I have an irrefutable argument that the moon landings were real and that there is no Roswell UFO stashed away in Area 51, and that argument is Donald Trump’s twitter account.

Donald Trump has generally exhibited the discretion of a parrot, and you would expect that if there was any truth to a moon hoax or Roswell cover up, he would have told us.

You might argue that whilst he is President, the US government is not going to tell him all its secrets for fear that he will do exactly that. Good point. However, Trump has never let the facts get in the way of a good story or tweet, so if he believes or suspects something, he will say so anyway. Hence his recent retweet about the Clinton body count when Epstein died in gaol, and his early advocacy of the Birther theory.

Same goes for 9/11 inside job. Trump would say so if he thought it was the case. JFK assassination… I’m kind of waiting for him to add it to the Clinton body count conspiracy theory.

Vaccinations causing autism etc? I don’t think Trump will prove or disprove that one. It’s a hippy theory and the only thing he likes about hippies is free love. Plus I doubt the US surgeon general is in a position to keep secrets from the public on vaccinations, unless it is somehow tied to the moon hoax….

The Emperor Vespasian was the son of a tax collector. This explains a lot.

As a form of revenue collection, he introduced a urinal tax. When his son Titus objected, according to his biographer Suetonius, Vespasian grabbed a coin from the pile of revenue from this tax and held it under his son’s nose, exclaiming ‘Doesn’t this money smell good’.

Titus got the point. He didn’t repeal the urinal tax when he became emperor.

Fast forward some 1950 years to now. Italy has very few public toilets. And those that it does have, mostly at railway stations, are pay toilets.

This, more even than the Colosseum, is the Flavian dynasty’s lasting legacy to Italian tourism.

Perhaps the toilets are kept in a better state this way. And if I am caught short after drinking a litre of mineral water or a couple of ‘calici’ of wine over lunch, I am not going to mind paying a euro to make my personal comment on the economy.

But what I do mind is that I do like being able to wander on foot far from my hotel, and to eat and drink whenever I feel like it. The remarkable lack of public toilets can make for a very uncomfortable time during such touristy meanderings.

I think this is my main grumble about Italy, as I near the end of my trip. To put it crudely, there are not even that many lemon trees to water, although I get a sneaking suspicion as to why there are so many lime trees in central Rome….