It’s been years, months, days and hours in the making but no matter how much preparation time I have had, I still feel as disorganised as I do in those panicked I-haven’t-done-any-reading-and-my-finals-start-tomorrow nightmares.

I am leaving on a jet plane on Monday and will be spending a week with my new neice in Dubai before arriving in subtropical Brisbane, my mother’s home town. Farewell parties, dinners, a photo shoot in the clamour of the Olympics site and an amazingly atmospheric meal at Andrew Edmonds behind me, it’s goodbye to London after six indulgent years.

With the elections and the Ashes on the way, as well as a trip to the outer reaches of the Barrier Reef with a TV crew, being taught to dive around shipwrecks in shark- and croc-infested waters by a top marine achaeologist and a fact-finding stint on a newly discovered wreck in Queensland all in the pipeline, it’s going to be busy.

I’ll be writing along the way – as well as features, I’ll be blogging away both here and for the Evening Standard at http://www.standard.co.uk/dumas. I’m taking commissions and hope to eventually end up in Sydney to focus on all things geographical, environmental and food-writing-related.

Image above taken by me of the final yards of the descent of Scafell Pike in the Lakes last week. It’s a lovely place, but it sure does rain, like.

Only seven days to go until I fly to Australia and I am buried under a mountain of completely worthless junk. It has value to me, mind, just not to most.

Packing has forced me to go through baskets, bags, piles and boxes of bits and pieces and like dusty time capsules, they’ve thrown a few leftfield reminders of the past six years into the August sunlight.

Event tickets – a lot of them. Bob Dylan at the O2, the Roots at Brixton, Bestival 2006, the opening night of Rufus Wainwright’s Prima Donna. The Aliens at Dingwall’s, The Pogues, Glastonbury ’09 and ’10. Tattered train stubs showing Delhi to Jaipur and Gokarna Junction to Karwar in Mumbai. A museum entrance from Marrakesh and boarding passes from Doha to Dubai. Euros, Dollars, Rupees and Dirhams. Carrot cake and peanut butter cookies recipes handwritten by a white witch I stayed with in Banff, Alberta, a security pass from work saying that Caroline Armstrong was being hosted by Dengie Doomer. I’ve had Daysi, Daysey and Dazie before but not a Dengie until 15th May 2008.

I should be cutting strips of old newsprint into strings of paper men for my leaving do. Instead, I’m sitting crossed-legged, surrounded by stacks of cuttings, magazines, bin-bags of clothes and ‘keep’, ‘chuck’ and ‘maybe’ piles, nostalgically daydreaming in sunny slants of dusty motes.