The visa was called a 457 — a skilled employer-sponsored visa. What it meant in practice was that Sciforma had gone to the Australian authorities and proven my particular skills weren't available locally, so they were allowed to import me. Sciforma had recently bought back the old MPS Sydney office from Francois, so in a strange way I was returning to a version of the same operation I'd left, just under a different flag. The catch was that I was tied to them — I couldn't just walk off and work for anyone else in the country. It wasn't a stamp in the passport or anything you could point to — just tied to my British passport and to Sciforma, invisibly, on paper somewhere.

And then it was time to actually go. I felt everything at once, but if I had to pick the loudest one, it was terror. I'd more or less learned to manage my anxiety by that point, but this was a different order of thing — another country, another life, no dress rehearsal. I got on the plane with my one big black suitcase, which held everything I owned in the world. Thanks to the Danish sleeping pills, I actually slept most of the way. Small mercy.

I landed at Sydney Airport, got through customs without a hitch, and stood there in my Hugo Boss jacket hoping I looked half as good as I apparently had to that woman in Los Gatos. A horn sounded, and there was Gabby in a little convertible — an Alfa, I think. We loaded my stuff in, and it turned out we recognised each other fine even though we'd only met once, briefly, years earlier. I remember thinking she was pretty hot. We drove back to hers, over the Harbour Bridge, and it was genuinely thrilling.

She lived in Wollstonecraft, a leafy suburb on the North Shore, in the top apartment of a house with a massive roof terrace she'd never quite got around to using. Three bedrooms. She showed me to mine, in the far corner, and that first night, lying there exhausted, I looked up and found a huge huntsman spider sitting on the ceiling directly above me. I took a photo and sent it to Mikey, who's terrified of spiders. He texted back the next morning in a total panic — how did you sleep, what did you do with it. I told him the truth: I just went to sleep.

Then the jet lag hit, and the anxiety hit with it. I went for a run. I was due to start with Maurya on the Monday, and that Saturday Gabby took me to the Kirribilli Club for dinner, which was kind of her. The next night she did something odd — took me for a drink at a bar in the city, and we "happened" to run into her ex. It felt staged. It was staged, as it turned out. She wanted him to see she had a much younger flatmate moving in. I was 45. She was 49. I've never rated my own looks especially highly, but apparently I was enough for her purposes, and she was more than happy to use me for them. I only worked that out much later.

Monday came, and I turned up to the new office in Bondi Junction — Maurya had picked it because she herself lived in Bondi Junction and wanted somewhere close. The original office had been on Macquarie Street, expensive and grand. Maurya wasn't interested in grand. What she'd found instead was a windowless basement space, and that's where we set up our computers and got to work.

She'd already brought on a young woman called Sarah, extremely capable, who'd been helping her hold the fort before I arrived. And almost immediately, in the middle of the jet lag and the anxiety and the general upheaval of my life, Sciforma wanted the requirements document from Kansas City. I looked at my notes from those meetings — scrawled, half-coherent, taken while I was barely tracking what was happening in the room — and had absolutely no idea what they wanted from me. Sarah talked me through it, step by step, and between us we put together something that Sciforma were genuinely happy with. I've never forgotten what she did for me there, because I was in a bad way.

Depression is a lousy word for what that actually is. It makes people picture someone lying in bed, not talking to anyone. It's not that. It's your mind in open revolt — jumping ahead to situations that haven't happened yet, each one setting off its own little alarm, so you can never just be where you are. You can't function properly and you can't explain why to anyone watching you not function. But I'd been through it before, and I knew exactly what had caused this bout — the move, the jet lag, no sleep — and I did what I'd done building Niels and Carey's website: recognised it for what it was and kept dragging myself back to the one task in front of me. I got the document done.

Then came the ordinary admin of starting a life — a bank account, and the first rent payment to Gabby, 1,800 Australian dollars, something like 2,200 US at the time, for one room in her three-bedroom flat. It started to grate on me early on that I was paying half the running cost of the place rather than a third — never mind that the third bedroom sat empty, kept for her daughter Steph, who was away at university.

Those first few weekends were tough. Gabby was an estate agent and often out showing houses, so it was just me, and I felt incredibly far away from my kids and everyone I cared about. I did a lot of jogging, and a bit too much drinking on my own, which I knew wasn't a good pattern, so I stopped it.

One thing stands out from those early weeks. Gabby had an old boyfriend she was still in touch with who lived on a boat at Bobbin Head Marina, and one Sunday, after she'd finished showing some open house, she said, "Let's take a drive up and go see him." We drove through what felt like national park for a long time, and then suddenly came out at this marina on the Hawkesbury River. I'd grown up around the Mediterranean, so I thought I knew what a marina looked like. I didn't. This one was on a bend in a river so deep and wide it looked like the sea, superyachts moored up, and we were many miles inland. I went swimming there without having the faintest idea it's known bull shark territory — something I'd find out the hard way, years later, but that's another story.

Then something happened that ended up changing a fair bit of my life. I got an email voucher for a discounted deep sea fishing charter — $99 instead of the usual $150 — and I bought it. The instructions said meet at Rose Bay on a Saturday morning at a set time. I turned up, and this boat pulled in that looked like a converted old fishing trawler, with a white-haired skipper called Josip at the wheel — Croatian, came over in the fifties, and about as rude to his customers as anyone I've ever met, Basil Fawlty included. We went out and did basic bottom fishing — a big lump of lead down a hundred metres, a couple of miles off Sydney Heads.

The deckhand on the boat was an American called Bud Bromley, who worked for Oracle and was around my age. We got chatting, and it turned out this boat, with the rude old Croatian captain, was just filling in — Bud's usual charter's main boat was out of action. Bud mentioned that the company had offered to pay for him to do his deckhand course, and that got my interest going. A few weeks later I called him and asked what it took. Four days, he said, and about $1,500, and you come out with your certificate.

So that's what I did. I took four days' leave and told Maurya I was doing my deckhand certificate. She didn't ask why. I told her I'd always wanted to get into boats and this was the first step, which was true, though what I didn't say was the other half of it — that under my visa I couldn't legally work for anyone but Sciforma, so there was no version of this where I could admit I liked the idea of picking up $150 a day on weekends doing something I actually loved.

Once I had the certificate, I called Bud. He said I could come out and shadow him — they wouldn't pay me, since one deckhand was enough, but it would be good practice. I said that sounded fine. We went out together and got on well. Bud told me how lucky I was to be doing my first proper deckhanding with him, and not with the boat he used to work, which was run by a Scotsman called Colin — by every account a complete maniac, with a string of stories about how badly he treated his staff, his crew, everyone.

A few weeks later we were dropping passengers at Rose Bay when there was Colin himself, on his own boat. Bud gave him a shout and a wave. Colin waved back. "That's the mad fuck I was telling you about," Bud said.

Which is as good a place as any to leave it, because how Colin and I came to know each other much better is a story for the next chapter.