Backpacking

as a surprise. I just hoped they recognised me; I was a lot hairier and somewhat fatter thanks to an exclusive "Super Size Me" diet of McDonald's $1 Double Cheeseburgers for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Day 349: 15th January Home Sweet Home

Long haul in-flight entertainment certainly has come on leaps and bounds in recent years. On my British Airways flight steaming homewards, I not only had the usual choice of films to watch on my own telly, but also the plane itself provided a good twenty minutes entertainment with an impressively lifelike simulation of a plane about to crash somewhere over the Atlantic. It really was the heaviest turbulence I'd experienced in all my flying years.

Once things had settled down, I switched my attention from the emergency procedures card to the film schedule. One of the more bizarre entries on my mental "List of Things to Do When I Get Home" was to seek out the lesser-known film Best in Show, a send-up of dog owners, written and starred in by the same chaps that did the legendary This is Spinal Tap. And even more bizarrely than that, I found it was one of the films being shown on the plane. Result.

I had a kip after the film, and awoke to an alarming pair of circumstances. Firstly, I had drooled extensively down my front; secondly, and more worryingly, we were approaching Wales. I craned at the window for my first view of the green and pleasant land I had left nearly a year ago.

The pilot had clearly been one of the