I flew from Washington to Newark, New Jersey, and returned to Hotel Stu on Broadway Terrace for one more night. I was still awake at 2am, writing sentimental notes about it being my last night as a TAFF tripper in America. My notebook has an addition on that page in a different pen: “Quote this verbatim to end it all.”

I don’t think so. If I’d written this report in the months after my trip, there might have been some value in it, but after 40 years it just doesn’t make sense.

At least I didn’t have to be up early on Friday to catch my flight home. It was scheduled for 19:00 from JFK, the ‘red-eye’ landing early on Saturday morning, so I had a day to fill. I don’t recall how I filled it, and my notes are more than inadequate on the subject, so it can’t have been with anything dramatic, or even interesting. I was just tired and wanting to go home, me and my suitcase of dirty laundry.

I didn’t sleep very well on the plane, just dozed from time to time.

I never do sleep well on planes. The only time I did manage it was on the way back from a business trip to the Far East, where my colleague Peter and I had gone to discuss with local Shell finance managers a report we had written on a Shell global financial system. Our recommendation was to abolish it, and having written the report, I was given the job of doing it. Be careful of what you ask for…

Anyway, we flew first into Singapore, then on to Manila and finally to Bangkok. For some reason, we had been booked on First Class from Singapore to Manila and so we turned up in the First Class lounge and drank complimentary dry martinis served by a young woman who elegantly knelt to place the drinks on the low table. We decided not to gulp down a second, on the grounds that there would be more free booze on the plane. We had not factored in that we were flying Egypt Air, which (being Islamic) did not serve alcohol. We had some very nice fruit juice cocktails, though.

Flying home from Bangkok I decided I would make use of a sleeping pill provided in the medical kit I had been issued with by Shell, which contained all sorts of useful stuff, including a syringe and a letter signed by the Chief Medical Officer saying the syringe doesn’t mean he’s a drug addict and please don’t arrest him. I hadn’t used the sleeping pills on the way out, but they were there so I took one. It worked, too.

Whilst I didn’t sleep much on the flight from New York, there was one particular guy who slept all the way, except when physically disturbed. Well, I guess lots of people learn how to do that, but he was right next to a mother with a screaming baby. He also kept hold of a glass in his right hand all the way. Legend!

The guy next to me got on the plane drunk, struggled with the overhead locker, and then slept most of the way across as well.

At 6am, British Summer Time (I’d adjusted my watch) on Saturday, I looked out of the window at 30,000 feet to see a rainbow dawn, grading from red on the horizon, very quickly through yellow and green to blue and indigo. I think it was the horizon; it might have been a layer of cloud, seen from above. There were certainly cloud patterns across the red. I hadn’t seen that before, or since. Strange and beautiful.

And then we landed.