Ladies and gentlemen! It gives me enormous pleasure to announce the final instalment of this, my epic memoirs of a few days in another country quite far away!!

The last day of any experience is tinged with sadness, but in this case I was reeling from all my new impressions and frankly I didn't have the mental capacity to get too worked up about having reached the end of my time in Japan.

I got up really early, having sensibly packed most of my stuff the night before, and did my morning ablutions. By the time I was about to leave, Steve was up & ready to go to work, so we walked together to Roppongi. There he bade me farewell and I went down into the Metro for one last time.

The route was familiar to me already, because once again I was going to Tokyo station, only this time I wasn't catching a Shinkansen but rather the airport express train. I just had time for a quick coffee & croissant (my god the croissant was unashamedly delicious - but also unashamedly expensive!) before going to the airport train platform and jumping on board.

An hour or so later I was at Narita, where the check-in procedure was smooth & orderly. The wait at the gate was uneventful, the flight uneventful, the views wintry & for the most part dusky (well, we were heading over the arctic in winter, so no surprises there). Arrival in London was uneventful, and even Terminal 5 was less chaotic than it had been on the way out. The onward flight to Munich was uneventful.

Things got eventfuller on arrival at Munich, when to my horror I discovered that my luggage hadn't made it back with me. My luggage, with all my liquid items in it of course, including my contact lenses. There followed a period - lasting DAYS - of absolute chaos, with phone calls to call centres in Italy, misinformation, cock-ups galore, and the most laughable text message I've ever been sent: "BA would like to inform you that your luggage will probably - note the word probably, people! - be arriving on day blah-blah on flight blah-blah" - which, naturally, it didn't.

And of course, because Munich was my final destination not my holiday destination, I didn't qualify for a penny of compensation. And of course, you can't actually ring BA customer services - oh no, we don't want to be speaking with Customers! And of course, I haven't had a reply to my "disgusted of Munich" email either. Bastards. British Airways can kiss my custom goodbye.

My mate Holger, who works for Lufthansa, had the misfortune to agree to meet me for a few drinks later that week, and I'm ashamed to say I vented all my airline frustration on him. But for fuck's sake, even once my bag had reached Munich, the arsewipes were still incapable of ringing me and arranging a delivery time, so that I might have a chance of being at home. No! Instead they just sent a driver, who turned up at my door with my bag, THEN rang me to say he would be taking my bag back to the airport because I wasn't home!

The second time this happened, I had to plead with the driver to not go back to the airport but instead to deliver his other bags and then come back to mine an hour later. Grudgingly, he obliged. But really, it was no skin off his nose whether he went to my address twice or not, plus this way I was out of their hair. He was worryingly close to being a total jobsworth, but I should thank my lucky stars that he had a milligram of flexibility. Anyway, I could at last see properly again.

The bag episode coincided neatly with a choir rehearsal & concert, which I admit complicated things. But the concert went off well (we sang some Fauré and some Rossini, and we had a full orchestra accompanying us). But I'm drifting away from Japan at this point, so I think I'll just stop writing now and leave this blog there, with the agony of luggage and the ecstasy of travel.