Our last day in Croydon was spent packing up and cleaning the house. We took time out for a free concert at Fairfield Halls. It was very well attended with organisers getting out lots of extra chairs. The price of free was that the singer, a soprano, sang the sorts of music that she would need to sing as part of music studies. Some songs were old favourites, others more obscure. She had a great pianist accompanying her.

Then, it was back to work after some last minute shopping.

Yesterday we still had things to finish off in the way of packing and cleaning, but still managed to get away with what we thought was lots of time. A few long queues later we were pretty much just in time for our flight.

Stephen had been longing for an apple and rhubarb crumble. He almost realised his dream as one of the deserts on our first flight was a strawberry rhubarb crumble.

The flight has been a long process. We had two security checks of our bags in Dubai, one very thorough, one fairly brief. We are wondering if there is a current raised security threat because of the release of prisoners in Syria. That was after a fairly thorough security check in England.

Stephen and I had seats near the front of the plane with a little corridor behind on both legs of the journey. It meant that we felt less hemmed in by people. We were fortunate that we didn’t have too much noise from babies and children, and there were a lot of kids on the Dubai to Perth leg.

We had nothing to declare at customs, so sailed through the process of electronic checkin, getting our bags, straight through customs and straight out to the taxi rank. Our driver was a young refugee from Afghanistan. He was friendly and kept up a conversation with Stephen on the journey. He learned English after arriving here and says there has been good support for himself and his family since they arrived here in Australia.

The house feels strange and things are in odd places around the house, but we are glad to be home and we should have it sorted out in a few days.

And Boris has a new Brexit deal with the EU to take to his government for approval, or not.