Australia?

 So, finally, following the Australian immigration service's less than eager granting of a visa, and an extremely uncomfortable series of flights lasting two days, but mysteriously consuming three (what happens to the lost day, by the way? Can I claim it back when I leave?), I have landed in Australia.  Staggering from the plane at the end of the final leg of the journey, the first thing that hits, is the light.  Australia is a land where the big light has, very definitely, been switched on. After the grey gloom of the north west of England, it is quite astounding. The brightness and contrast have been adjusted; everything is clearly and crisply visible, in a way that it seldom is in England.  It is almost a different world.

And, in mid-summer, a very hot world. Forty degrees of dry heat, like walking into an oven.  Your mouth dries out, almost immediately, and the sun on your head seems to have both weight and heat.  This is not an English summer's day.   Although, much that surrounds one is unmistakably English; there is much, also, that is strange. There are four seasons, but they are reversed.  There are trees and fields, but the fields are brown and many of the trees are unfamiliar, rather alien, native species, which perfume the air:  There is the aroma of gum trees everywhere ( or, perhaps just in the part of Australia in which I landed, or at that time of the year).  There are birds and animals, but they, too, although in some respects familiar, are disconcertingly strange to the new arrival from the planet North.  A stray kangaroo suddenly bounds across a suburban street that otherwise would not look out of place in Surrey.  Cockatoos screech from the telephone wires, and sometimes speak (escaped pets, or intelligent eavesdroppers?), while kookaburras laugh mockingly as you pass by. English is spoken,by people as well as birds, but yet seems a different language.  England through the looking glass?  The world as seen from the other direction? Or, just jet-lag?