I left Auckland on Tuesday and entered the strange zone of international travel. Impressions: Sydney, walked around the airport, hot sun through glass. Our plane, parked outside the gate, was strikingly scorched and scarred about the tail. On board, an Australian couple next to me; when I came back from the toilet my airline blanket had vanished. My neighbours swaddled in blankets, he with more than one. Later he stole my headphones, which I hadn't yet unwrapped, and replaced them with his, which had the foam missing. I'm familiar with this phenomenon – airline travel brings out the worst, the savage, in people. In Bangkok, tiny ferocious security officials confiscated the toy I had bought for my London nephew, on the grounds that it was magnetised. I argued, a supervisor was called – I trying it on because I wanted the toy, it was a good one! A conversation – I explaining. But the tiny man flew into a rage and began pushing me down the hall. 'When I say no I mean no!' Other travellers staring. I propelled down the hall, feeling quite calm and detached, thinking 'well, it was worth a try.' Hard not to suspect that the Thai officials, so minute and exquisitely turned out, might regard their large and slobbish and shambolic visitors with a modicum of distaste. The tattoos, the fatness, the floppy leisurewear. A group of giant toddlers, huddled in our metal pen.
London was grey and mild. Walked among the squirrels in Queens Park with my sister.

 It's wonderful to be back in London – how I love London when I don't live there. The next day I got the Heathrow express from Paddington and mooched about outside Terminal 1 at Heathrow, watching the security men, admiring the tremendous weaponry of the British police. Staring at them and their guns makes them stare back. The place suddenly full of eyes. Going in, my handbag was swabbed for explosives, my shoes inspected, the usual stuff. In the bookshop on the air side a tall Indian youth whose hands were shaking so much he couldn't handle his change. At the Aer Lingus gate a man whose face was so boiled and cooked with the booze and his eyes so blue that I couldn't stop looking. For all his strange colour he was handsome: Paul Newman gone to ruin. Keen, agitated  eyes. He darted up, consulted the staff on the gate, who rolled their eyes – nipped into the bar and downed two glasses, rapidly. He became calm again.

Landing at Cork I smelled a familiar whiff: cows. Cork is small and pretty, rainy and mild, built along the broad, green River Lee. That evening, completely stoned with lack of sleep, I was led to my reading in the Trsikel Arts Centre, a couple of hours after I'd arrived. And the reading went well, and the interview afterwards. I carried it off, I think. No disasters, no horrors. And afterwards went to a bar with a San Fransiscan writer, two Irish poets, three Irish writers and some others – a journalist, an agent – and was plied with Irish Drink. A lot of talk about writing and writers. I very happy. Woke in the night with headache, and looked out over the town – rain, soft grey clouds. I like Cork very much. In the morning I went down to the market and had toast and coffee. Everything laid on by the Festival. There's lots on: readings for the next few days, and then the awards ceremony on Sunday. At  breakfast a woman asked me: how is your country dealing with its plague of mice? Oh we're doing OK, I said. Fighting back. She said, 'And don't you have a kind of huge frog that's taking over everything?'  'The cane toad you mean?' 'Yes.' It's bad, I said. 'But there's hope.'