Many years ago, I read a book by an evangelical Christian which offered a classic example of a writer figuratively putting his thumb on the scale to make a point. While inveighing about the lost nature of mankind, he mentioned seeing the need for God in the despair of the human faces emerging from the international terminal at the San Francisco airport.

It seems to me that stationing himself where he could watch people getting off of trans-Pacific flights was pretty unfair. I defy anyone, with or without Jesus as their co-pilot, to fly for fourteen hours in coach and not come off the plane gray-faced, tottering, and empty-eyed.

***

Our introduction to Sydney was the bus ride from the airport.

In the midst of glimmering glass skyscrapers are blocky Victorian relics, built from a local, reddish yellow stone, buildings so aggressively English they seem less expressions of patriotism than desperate assertions by homesick colonists.

“We are British! We are,” some long dead architect says to us. “Look, here’s another statue of Queen Victoria. And a man with side-whiskers and a steely gaze. And here on the cornice is a lion. See the lion? See the turrets, the blocky finials? We’re English, Dammit. Forget those @&%! parrots perched on the roof.”