Having said this, leave it to us to discover Facebook in the middle of packing. It’s a near-certainty now: that with our attentions diverted to unearthing long-lost elementary-school chums, we will arrive in London having forgotten to pack underpants.

Anyway, we’ve opted for Cuba (i.e. Communism Lite), thinking about spending 7 days in a resort (which we’ve never done), then 7 days of the usual traipsing-around as we tend to do. Time to go now, before the Bushies get in and while Castro’s still around to preserve the 50’s-time-warp that is one of the last remaining Workers Paradises.

For Nazma, though, the adventure into (temporary) unemployment begins today, with a carefully deployed going-away-do downtown. How productive will we be now, given my penchant for sleeping-in, feeding off of her penchant for same, in a vicious cycle of comfyness?

Now the excitement begins!

People ask if I’m excited, presumably because I appear to be the total opposite. I really am, but I probably won’t be visibly hopping till the plane is taxiing down the runway.

In any case, here’s a parting shot: Grumbles, my soon-to-be-departed, parked next to an Al Gore future.

This is likely all old news by now, since you are probably reading this sometime in early March. No way we’re letting the cat out of the bag before we let our workplaces know. Nothing like a pink slip to throw a wrench in the works (or, funnily enough, move up our departure).

Once in a while, a moment will just click, and all of a sudden you wake up and realise where you are. Sound stupid? We wade through the haze of the everyday wake-work-eat-sleep routine here on autopilot most of the time, so I mean: that sometimes, something happens and you snap out of it. It doesn’t take much: something as mundane as everything else, just in a different cast than the rest of the monotone.

For me, the moment came when the big beer-sodden bastard beside us starting flailing his elbows at a particularly punchy song. As we tried to avoid broken noses, the strobes caught his arm hair like little black icicles against the brilliant backdrop of bass and bobbing heads and everything just froze. And ridiculous as it sounds, the sight of the thug’s thorny simian arms haloed against the strobe, every one of them distinct and deadly, like those vaguely Celtic-looking pointy-knot designs on t-shirts from Surrey, shook me from wherever I’d been: a discontinuity, and my head was in a different place from before.

Now, “buddy’s got a lot of body hair” isn’t exactly the sort of epiphany that inspires people to great deeds, and it certainly didn’t cause me to do anything more than shift over a foot to the right. But there’s a strange clarity in that instant when your inner sight suddenly expands, and you see all the possibilities and the manifold effects and consequences. Like, for instance, pulling up stakes and leaving promising careers and an increasingly resigned but dangerously comfortable existence. Everywhere we wanted to head, what it all meant, and what it would irrevocably do to us, crystallised in that instant.

What did I learn? Not much: the synths crested and pulled me back to the music and the moment leapt on, like gold-leggings on a sprung dancefloor. But I’d begun recently to believe and fear that the quotidian haze had utterly eroded my ability to process with that kind of lucidity, and Arm-Hair, with his muttonchopped appendages, had given me a strobe-light shot of hope: that I haven’t completely lost it.

Despite how ludicrous this post has turned out to be.

Where to this time? Lebanon was a favourite hope until the wanton destruction of the past year. Iran, perhaps, before it meets a similar fate at the hands of the semi-retarded Leader of the Free World? Back to SE Asia, and a slow boat down the Mekong into Laos before the bandwagons rush the borders (hypocrite that I am)? And there’s always visiting Nazma’s parents in Uganda. We’re open to suggestions…

Then, after this indeterminate period of long-distance coaches, ordering grisly offerings in distant eateries through sign-language, and general contentment, we’ll be looking at slipping into a more established existence somewhere overseas. London seems to be the destination-of-the-moment for us, with the siren call of greater opportunities for more fulfilling careers. Add in the bonus of having family there, and family close by (relatively: Africa is only 9 hours away instead of 18), but having spent a winter there, London’s not the most beautiful place one could live in. Lots to think about, and quickly, with the spectre of turning 30 and the twin threats of responsible adulthood and babies lurking at the edges of our rapidly fading youth.