“I take Xanax and a Valium with red wine after I’ve had the first meal – bring my own mask, bring the neck pillow thing, plus noise-cancelling headphones – and I usually sleep for six hours even though I’m tall.”

“OK, Xanax and Valium … wow. Let’s talk about that! Aren’t you worried you might die in your seat? I just take one or the other but usually double dose. The noise-cancelling headphones have saved my life.”

“Yeah, like literally, they do.”

Last week at a dinner party in London the night before my 24-hour flight back to Australia (Qantas, via Dubai) I swapped coping strategies with the other Australian at the table.

The Brits at the dinner were perplexed. “You’re all very … er … tactical … ” said one, who had clearly never made the trip.

“YOU HAVE TO BE!” we Australians all-but-screamed. “You need to get on that plane with a plan!”

To get on that plane without a plan – without knowing if your tactic will be to have 50 drinks or none, or to take a sleeping pill on the first leg or the second, or to go without sleep the night before, or to set your watch to the new time zone the day before you fly – is to risk feeling horrible and out of sorts for weeks. It’s as though there has been a zombie takeover and you are Patient Zero.

This horrible feeling includes not just the physical discomfort of having slept (if you’re lucky) sitting up, breathing in stale, recycled air, the horror of seeing yourself in hour 20 in the plane toilet mirror – plus the horror of the plane toilet. There’s a strange feeling of existing out of time.

One friend described jetlag to me in a metaphysical way: your body has taken the journey but your soul is still in another time zone.

There are so many benefits to living in Australia – but a major downside is being 18 to 24 hours away from a lot of the world’s good bits: New York, for example, or London, or Mexico City.

The flight can beat up your body. Appetite, sleep, hormones – flying can play havoc with your menstrual cycle – all get thrown around when you take a long-haul trip.

A few years ago I visited a high-end medical spa in the Philippines, whose clientele are business people required to travel a lot for work. It was like Shaun of the Dead out there by the pool and under the palm trees. The clients’ bodies were completely confused, explained the spa staff – they were awake when they should have been sleeping, hungry at weird hours of the day and night, suffering acne breakouts (in their 50s!), constipation and gut problems. At the spa they fasted, had colonic irrigation, slept and tried to reset their body clocks before the next long-haul battering.

But last week before my London-to-Melbourne flight, I was prepared. I had a plan. A US journalist I’d met had fasted Dallas–to-Melbourneand claimed to have experienced no jetlag. So I wasn’t going to eat on the flight and, on the leg from Dubai, I was going to down some Valium with a red wine and try to sleep for six hours.

Yet horror is not confined to the long haul. The night before the dinner party in London, I had flown into Gatwick from Italy – a journey of a couple of hours. A cinch, right? Wrong.

I’d taken the train to the airport but left a bag on board, and had to go back and hold up the train while searching through each carriage for it (I found it – phew, it contained the Valium). I then got stuck in a massive immigration queue (to leave the country – huh?). On the verge of missing my flight I sprinted to the gate, which happened to be the equivalent of an outer-suburban lounge, many kilometres away. Just before the plane took off, I fell into my seat next to a mother and son. A coughing fit hit. The son started complaining about me; maybe he thought I couldn’t understand English. “This plane is very unhealthy. She hasn’t stopped coughing.”

Yo, I’m here. Just because I’m coughing it doesn’t make me deaf.

Then, half an hour in, the man in the row across from me disappeared from his seat. When I looked back to the end of the plane he was sprawled on the floor.

The mother-son duo were complaining that the food trolley hadn’t been down our way. They wanted bacon baps!

A flight attendant explained that the crew were short staffed because of a medical emergency. It was the guy on the floor at the back of the plane.

An hour in, the energy in the aircraft seemed to shift. A doctor was summoned and hurried down the back. There was the sound of ice being shovelled and an urgent English voice: “Clive! Clive! Hang in there, Clive.” (He wasn’t called Clive, but let’s call him that.)

One of Clive’s legs was hooked over the other. The staff kept pleading with him. There was the sound of the ice being shovelled again. Another flight attendant appeared and opened the lockers near our heads. “Did anyone see what sort of bag he was travelling with?” she asked.

I’ve never been in a flight that landed so quickly. Two ambulances were waiting on the tarmac and we remained seated while paramedics ran on to the plane.

At Gatwick immigration control they were harsh, mean, gimlet-eyed and pulled at my passport, as if to test it for weaknesses. The immigration officer wanted to know why I was there, who I was with, who I knew in the country, what I was going to do for the two days I was there, what was my profession, did I have a job, did I have a return ticket, did I have an address in the UK? For a few long seconds I thought I wouldn’t be allowed in. I would be deported to … where? Italy? Not a bad life, I suppose. Then the stamp fell on my passport and made that reassuring thud – although part of me still felt unsettled by the encounter.

I retired to my room at the Gatwick Premier Inn (bright purple carpet that felt as if it would ignite if you rubbed it the wrong way) feeling tres existential. And two days later at Heathrow, as I boarded the long flight, I was still thinking of Clive.

As I write this, I’m still struggling with jetlag even though my method and machinations meant I slept for about six hours on the flight. It was glorious to return to Australia, where I went straight to the Sydney writers’ festival.

I was taking part in three sessions there, including one on my new book, Wellmania.

First stop was the Gleebooks festival bookshop. There were some early copies of the book. It was the first time I had seen the manuscript as an actual book.

I crept closer and gazed at them, in the manner of someone looking at sleeping newborns.

“Hello, you guys,” I murmured to the bright yellow stacks. “Welcome to the world.”