Christmas is not my favourite time of year. I cannot blame it on some childhood trauma – unless it is so deeply repressed that I can't remember it – just a dislike of the various pressures it seems to bring and the way it truncates the month of December so that everything has to be done before Christmas. And the weather in the UK at the end of December does not help one iota. My cunning plan for Christmas Day 2013 was to be in the sky. My destination of choice was Western Australia, where I had never been and...