Bound for Oxford in the UK, we left Australia a fortnight ago through an empty Sydney airport. We carried a thick folder of documents - proof of vaccination, proof of a UK residential address, orders for antigen tests, expensive travel insurance with COVID-19 cover.
Everything is bizarre these days, so too a stopover in Darwin for a Qantas flight to old Blighty. The Boeing Dreamliner was barely half full, but its passengers packed a very basic terminal for two hours, staring at a departures board that said London, Groote Eylandt, Gove, Alice Springs and Mcarthur River.
From Darwin we embarked on a 17 hours-long slog, our wariness growing of the health consequences of our decision to travel. We landed disrespectfully early at Heathrow. A few idle hours on, the sun's first rays took us across Hyde Park, surely the most wonderful of all urban parklands, and on to a decent breakfast in Sloane Square where we joined cafe lingerers and a goodly number of shoppers, mostly mask-less. We figured vaccinations, boosters and Christmas doses of Omicron made us low-risk, but we masked-up regardless.
Later that day, we arrived in Oxford. The train journey took an hour, a snail's pace by European standards, but quite the gallop compared with the speeds we suffer on the Newcastle to Sydney line.
London is inseparable from the life of Oxford and Oxfordshire.
We immediately jabbed up with a flu vaccine at a walk-in pharmacy, faithful to modern medicine in a city where science has proved its merits through the centuries. Here the unfairly maligned AstraZeneca vaccine was developed, a gift to the world from a devoted scientific team in late 2020. With the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, it has delivered the platform needed re-assemble our lives, fending off assault from this hideous infection.
On Oxford streets, like in London, the large majority is unmasked, but there is a demographic divide. The faces of those north of 30 years are eyes plus cloth. The rest are the full faces of youth, defined and bright, and blushed with the rosy cheeks of winter.
Oxford is spires, Harry-Potter buildings, cobbled streets. These are over-filled with these young, bright, optimistic folk. Their disregard for the mask is, what, a folly - or the optimism of those determined to decide their own future?
By the weekend, we gathered the confidence to move out-of-town, to a village in the Oxfordshire countryside, where we have friends, a much-valued legacy of previous work stints over here.
These villages house many people growing old, and there is an obstinate fear of the virus among them. The strain on Britain's national health service, the NHS, is obvious and distressing. The sadness of a cancer sufferer and his septuagenarian wife left to their own resources to cope with a death not too far away shows what can happen when a public health system fails to deliver.
Yet there is positive demographic change in these Oxfordshire villages. A local industrial park booms with knowledge-intense activity, firms in electronics, space-research, logistics, all eager to draw from a thick pool of professionally-trained locals.
With more than a nod to a clean energy future, the local Didcot coal-fuelled power station is now demolished.
The surrounding valleys are freed to re-engage with agriculture, re-build local food markets, align sustainability with health and wellbeing. These valleys attract young families, grasping the opportunities that a work-from-anywhere professional labour market can bring.
Our village is in a Thames River valley, a watershed running to London and out to the open sea. London is inseparable from the life of Oxford and Oxfordshire.
The Romans, barge traders, besieged kings and queens, ramblers, prime ministerial residences, gallop tracks for the idle rich, science parks, quality schools and universities, these all come in partnerships with London.
Unlike the Newcastle-Sydney axis, however, the Oxford-London axis is mutually aligned, with positive embrace for each other, contested, sure, but with each better for the other's prosperity.
After more than two centuries of European settlement, the Hunter River valley is yet to learn this art of cross-regional back scratching.
For petty reasons, Newcastle and the Hunter insist on feuding with Sydney. The grudge is always there.
We need to learn from elsewhere that there is another way forward.
