Aboard this 380 to Auckland, just leaving Dubai, after a shower and a coffee, I have time to get blogging. This beautiful aircraft has climbed so slowly and just reached 31,000 feet after half an hour, so full of fuel it must be. Far ahead lie a further fifteen hours air time. The view from the tail is into the Sun.

Do not take travelling half way around the world, in as many hours as there are hoops in Croquet, for granted. Towards Dubai the pilot changed course to fly over friendly territories. Our GPS remained unjammed by war zones below. Arabic names on the sky-map evoke mystical and exotic memories. But now we leave them behind and begin to see Indian place names as we skirt the tip of India. Thrivanhapenpruven spans almost 300 nautical miles on the map.

Rose Iced Tea and Arabic Mezze is my lunch. I am not having a main course or a desert although they all look so good. I watch 'JFK What the Doctors Saw'. This comes sixty years after the first report. Sixty years, the declassification watershed, so often it is.

Everyone else on board started off quite lively but now there is a lot of snoozing going on. In fact my empty glass has disappeared and I am not sure how that happened.

Amusements we have between us: Telegraph crosswords. A Chess set and book, and some previously downloaded YouTube stuff.

Mach 0.851 seems to be the cruising speed of the 380, I have never heard of anything so fast. But we still 'lose' a day along the way. Happily Scot and Virgil turned up first on the carousel.