Against the cerulean blue of the South Australian sky, an octopus soars, its limbs flailing wildly. The man who has thrown it stands beneath, frozen, looking like a baseball pitcher, his leg just so. The spectators behind him crane their

I had fallen in with an Emirates flight crew—British, Irish, South African, Korean—sometime after eleven. A Swedish stewardess, the eldest among them at a mere thirty-something, watched her charges’ increasingly drunken antics with a wry smile and a half-concealed yawn