The long haul flight took an interesting route.

Its first stop after leaving Edinburgh was the city of Perth, 32 miles north of the Scottish capital. The plane travelled here by road, and collected extra passengers from the High Street. Then it took to the air to reach Kuala Lumpur. Its final destination was somewhere in Australia, but this didn’t interest me because I was only travelling as far as Malaysia.

I happily boarded the flight at Edinburgh and was delighted when a friendly woman wearing the same navy House of Bruar cashmere overcoat as me took the seat to my right. We were actually the only passengers in seats; all the Malaysians preferred to lie on the floor.

Everything started to fall apart after I disembarked at KL and realised that I should have carried hand luggage only. Meanwhile my big suitcase was on its way to Australia in the plane’s hold.

Added to this, when I was reunited with TPR he appeared to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He embarrassed himself in front of a huge audience unable to finish the first sentence of his speech that began ‘My career in the computer industry…’