I’ve just arrived in the beautiful Fairmont Empress hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, probably the most lavish room I have stayed in with its colonial style. The darkening sky tells me that evening is starting to settle in. But because I have not reset my watch as I have travelled Westwards across time zones, I can see that its exactly 24 hours since I climbed in a taxi in the darkness outside my mother’s house in Ruislip, Middlesex and had to put up with the driver’s spooky stories and inquiries all the way to Heathrow Airport – so, he asked after squeezing me for the information that I was an academic going to a conference, it’s the tax payer paying for your jollies is it then? The rest of the time has been in planes and, perhaps more tiring, sitting around in airports and being subject to huge amounts of questioning and x-raying. The constant security probes do start to feel personal and wearying. How I’m looking forward to next week’s (yikes!) ferry to Denmark, where you just turn up and drive on. Is it the tiredness, the air-conditioning, the anonymous space, or the body’s confusion over time that puts you into a dull trance? A kind of drugged alienation where you can’t really think or concentrate or be on edge, where you have to remind yourself five times to pick up your passport, where you forget things on the countless forms you have to fill in. A kind of passive mode.