I'm coming home, I'm coming...

I'm in London, happily being rained on (I get the quintessential British experience, coming home in Wimbledon week), having paid my first visit to a British shop to invest in some Melton Mowbray pork pies and a hunk of Danish Blue. I get back to Japan looking like Bella Emberg, but I will be very, very happy.

The journey was uneventful, perhaps a mercy given the potential expensive of any cock-ups and perhaps a curse as it was almost 24 hours of bored nothingness. My backside is numb from sitting and sitting and sitting and my shoulder is hanging a few inches lower than usual from the weight of my hand luggage (everything I could not risk losing should my case go astray, so practically everything). I did nearly miss my connection in Hong Kong by arrogantly ignoring the advice video on the flight and then having no idea what to do and where to go and finding myself in a queue for a desk I didn't need to visit before finally, frustratedly asking someone how long I had to wait and told I didn't have to wait at all being pointed in the right direction at the back of a thousand-person queue for security checks. I also got checked for bird 'flu as I entered Hong Kong airport and reassurely passed...

Hong Kong airport is a holiday in itself. It's huge and has loads of designer stores that I could never hope to shop in. The view of the city itself is breath-taking too. The airport overlooks the bay, which is fenced off by regiments of enormous high-rises and all this is nestled at the base of a fair-sized mountain range. Narita airport is not bad either (perhaps I have just travelled from Stansted once too often, where there is "not even a MacDonald's") and while waiting for my flight I stood on the observation deck watching the cargo planes take off and land and pondered how in the hell they managed it. I might get into physics for a while so I can get my head around it.

I needn't have bothered packing my textbook in my hand luggage. I took it out of my bag and stowed it into the pocket on the seat in front for the full duration of the flight, instead sitting through the embarrassingly homophilic Bentback Mountain (maybe I'm just getting a bit "small 'c' conservative" in my old age, but the story hardly justified the many, many gay love scenes - although I think I would have relaxed more had I not been painfully aware of how visible my screen was to a very kakkoii passenger a few rows behind me. Everyone else was watching Disney and I was browsing soft gay porn... I also watched the Libertine (better) and a unnecessary racist drama with Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore. I made the most of the free-flowing red wine, although once the air cabin staff clocked this, I was provided with ever greater portions of snacks to soak up the alcohol and so left the plain with my hand luggage spilling Tim Tam bars. At one point, the passenger next to me opted in for a red wine at the same time as me, so I said 'let's get drunk', but, possibly being the only Chinese person to not understand English, he just looked confused and I looked embarrassed.

Getting onto the cramped, grubby Tube was disappointing. I'd actually been looking forward to it, but had forgotten the littered state of neglect it falls into on Sundays until I had to dig my seat out from under a mountain of Sunday supplements and KFC wrappers. I am not sure I could honestly recommend London to a Japanese traveller. I love the city and am so pleased to be back here, even the rain is welcome (despite making the two bikinis I packed for the heatwave utterly redundant), but it compares badly to Japan on a superficial level. The trains, the service in shops. I was completely thrown by a lad in a t-shirt chatting into his mobile asking if I needed any help while I was dousing myself with duty free perfume testers at Heathrow, rather than bowing and excusing the intrusion while offering me something weird, but free to taste (this occasionally means Dairy Milk and bagels, so I often lurk around supermarkets trying to look rich and inexperienced in diet). I've often felt uncomfortable with the level of needless servitude in Japan, and still do, but it does make our lot look like a bunch of louts.

It is wonderful to be back in the company of the relaxed and the sane. I've only been here a few hours, but I've already clocked up more TV hours in one day than I had in Japan in the last month. It's been brilliant. News, football coverage in English (stupidly, I asked if the game was live, having got so used to seeing 11pm kick-offs) and daytime TV. Bliss. This morning, I watched an unbelievably chav-tastic episode of Jeremy Kyle. A woman who had been taken into care for having scabies and adopted was physically attacked by her birth mother for calling her a prostitute, though the mother then admitted she was, but that the daughter manned sex lines while her children were in the house. From the state and sounds of them, I can't imagine either drummed up a roaring trade... Later, a fat girl and her special needs ex-boyfriend fought over his visitation rights to his son. Her new boyfriend came on and was excessively patronised by the self-loving Kyle, while the ex's sister told her to get off her fat arse and stand up for herself. It blows Trisha out of the water. This Morning made it a double-whammy with an aristocratic photographer grubbily romanticising a sexual fling he had with his own mother at the age of 15 (I can't help wondering if the piece would have been handled as light-entertainment had it been a girl and her father). He was showing off her portrait with a 'well, wouldn't you?' attitude, which Fern seemed eager to bolster, while his wife was introduced with the caption 'husband had sex with mother' and yet still managed to pull off a fairly dignified interview. It's good to be back.