“I think this bone is from a different animal”, Georg said to Toni, “it doesn’t match.”

I had nothing to comment on this, but Toni seemed to agree. They collected several of the other bones scattered in the dirt, pausing to examine a skull. We continued up the hill towards the sound of cattle bells, crossing fence stiles, and kicking up dirt, until we came to Eremo di San Felice, a former church. For the next five days, Toni and Georg would be running a training week for Collettivo Rewild Sicily.

The room brimmed with the smell of citrus and half a kilo of honey poured onto his gloop of porridge, a concoction which I assumed to be grandfatherly smells, but which turned out to simply be the smell of my own Grandfather. He slurped up the porridge from his spoon, more smoothie than porridge. Once finished, he would hold an orange within his strong, rugged hands, hands that fishermen could envy, and peel it above his emptied porridge bowl with a little spoon, whittling away at the skin like a carpenter, dosing the room in a film of juice.

The phrase ‘life-long fascination’ has always irked me. There are few things that fascinate us at birth which continue to fascinate until death. I can’t claim a life-long fascination for pink Teletubby custard because, although I was consumed with dreams of eating it soon after birth, I’ve since settled for regular, easy-to-find custard. Likewise, I can’t claim a life-long fascination for Scotland because, although I am still fascinated, I was blissfully ignorant of its existence until after I could crawl.

Now, if I was to find myself stabbed by a platypus spur this afternoon I would feel a pain 10 times worse than plunging my foot into a cauldron of lego. But if a platypus male was stung while in a scrap he would feel an irritable sting like you or I might get from a bee. 

It was a very wet day in the Blue Mountains. Clouds had lowered themselves to the cliffs, while waterfalls which only yesterday were small trickles began to swell. Katoomba’s empty main street rang with the sounds of rain hitting off cafe signs and streams trickling into gutters. I stood in the middle of this deluge of sound and water, having delayed the day's hike while the rain malingered, reading cafe menus and identifying reasons why I shouldn’t eat lunch at any food establishment I found across. After many hangry thoughts I decided I wanted to try Sushi.

It was a cold, sky-blue Saturday when I discovered the wonderful concept of a “quiet carriage”, a section of a train where making any sort of noise is frowned upon. This is particularly wonderful news for anyone who has attempted to read while finding your seat surrounded by several inebriated members of a happy hen party. Unfortunately on this particular Saturday I was hungry and had just purchased crisps, which have to be the loudest food on the planet. This made me the first human to attempt the impossible task of eating crisps in a noiseless fashion, inserting a hands into the packet and taking pains not to let the plastic crinkle, in the same way one would play Operation.

Now that was the final straw for me. It was only 6am and I had already unearthed preparations for an impending natural disaster that no one had bothered to tell me about. And now there seemed to be some dressing-gowned creep slowly raking leaves in his garden before dawn. I was so on edge that I was convinced this eager gardener wanted to do me harm. He was waiting for me, passing the time by sweeping his yard, ready to attack me using his customised rake handle with a serrated edge. I came to Australia expecting to find the vibrant, busy, lets-all-photograph-the-opera-house Sydney of my childhood, not the opening scene of a horror film.

Australian school children see any form of transport (car, bus or moped) as a grand excuse to take off their shoes. It does not matter whether you are driving across the country for hours or popping out to the shops to buy veggie-mite, the shoes slide off instantly. For my cousins it is common practice to not only remove your footwear but also to somehow ensure that each shoe and sock is under a different seat on the other side of the vehicle. Middle is particularly adept at this and has managed to transport his socks from one end of an aeroplane to the other without leaving the comfort of his seat. Sure enough, when we went to leave we discovered that all three children were barefoot, with various items of footwear decorating the bus and giving it the feel and smell of a Gym on a Friday evening where someone had left the window open beside a field full of slurry.

Sydney twinkled its lights beneath us and suddenly a chocolate bar didn’t seem as important, even if it could lead to my incarceration for breaching Australia’s immigration laws

I had never before seen it take so long to check-in bags to an aeroplane. The queue was growing longer and longer yet my family continued to debate which bags to stow away and which to bring as hand luggage. Just when I thought everything was settled, the Grandfather decided to unpack his suitcase and fish out a bulging plastic bag containing every single type of medication he'd ever been prescribed. The Mother then haggled with the woman at the check-in desk, trying in vain to get seats together, and the long walk to the plane through the warren of terminal two saw the Father and Brother trying every possible seat combination to determine who would sit with whom. These images stuck in my mind as we flew above the Portuguese coastline.

Miscounting 60 cents is only one of the side effects of the Leaving Cert. For its duration, my bottle of toothpaste was continuously drenched in water each morning due to my mistaking it for a toothbrush, my Weetabix was almost covered in ketchup because I thought it was honey, and it was a while before I could be trusted to cross the street without the safety of a traffic light.