My winter break began a little later than anticipated.  I had expected to leave Hong Kong last Sunday night to spend two weeks in Australia catching up with family and friends.  However, as the final packing was underway, we discovered that Andrew’s passport had been misplaced.  Knowing the obvious - that it is difficult to travel internationally without a passport (or even internally if the country is China!), we reluctantly moved to Plan B - Di left as planned on Sunday night, while Andrew and I spent all of Monday arranging for an Emergency Passport through the Australian Consulate-General in Wanchai and rebooking flights.  The consular staff were extremely helpful and co-operative (I suspect it was not the first time they have had to deal with a case of a lost passport), and we had a replacement passport by mid-Tuesday.  The airline staff were similarly very helpful, and having secured the last two seats on our flight, we left Hong Kong on Tuesday night, arriving in Australia on Wednesday morning.

Our time so far has been spent catching up with our children, family and friends, and catching up on sleep too as far as possible.  The other catching up has been with e-mails; the College’s e-mail system continues to malfunction somewhat and yesterday afternoon I suddenly managed to access more than 70 messages that had been sitting in cyberspace, some for as long as a week and a half.  I always like to keep up-to-date with e-mails, so the first Saturday afternoon (and evening) of my holiday was spent simply dealing with the backlog of e-mails.  The good news is that if you have been waiting on a reply from me for what seems like an unusually long time, you should have received it by the time you read this :-)  As far as I know, I am up-to-date with e-mails now, but as I discuss with my ToK class, absolutely certainty is difficult to define and even more difficult to know whether you have achieved it.  My e-mail experience this week is the evidence of that (I’ll stop short of declaring it to be ‘proof’!).