This was not meant to be how my first postcard about a three-week trip to Europe for the Newcastle Herald went.
I was sure I'd be waxing lyrical about my beautiful four-day narrowboating trip along the River Thames through the Cotswolds with my closest friend, Phil, and two daughters Mila, 16, and Freya, 13.
Instead, I'm sitting at a stone benchtop in the kitchen of a 1792 cottage in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, nursing badly bruised ribs and trying to get support from my travel insurers.
It all happened in slow motion, as these things often do. Stepping off our narrowboat last Thursday evening as we moored at an Oxfordshire village called Newbridge, I slipped on the wet riverbank and fell heavily onto my left side, before ignominiously sliding into the fast-flowing River Thames.
Once in the river, with Phil in charge of the 20.42-metre narrowboat, and with the water and current swelled by recent heavy rains upstream, my real issues were just beginning. As I surfaced and gasped for air I knew I was in trouble, the pain was immense and I was breathing very hard. Plus, with my daughters busy trying to bang in tent pegs to secure the mooring ropes on the wet river banks, there was nobody to help me get out of the water.
In shock, I managed to get up close to the bank, but with my injury, getting out onto it appeared to me like the final ascent of Mount Everest. It took 15 minutes, grasping at the sturdiest tufts of grass and groaning, finding tenuous footholds in the muddy river bed and sides and grimacing, and breathing like a gorilla in a sauna, with my oldest daughter now gently coaxing me - "you can do it, Dad ... you're nearly there ... one last pull" - to finally extract myself from Britain's most famous river.
With my body convulsed in shakes and on the edge of vomiting from the shock, I made it back onto the boat and was held, fully clothed, under a hot shower for 20 minutes.
Accidents happen and I have to say I feel lucky not to have hit my head on the boat or to have drowned and "got away with" badly bruised ribs, even though they are a bugger to live with and take weeks to heal (two of which remain of our European trip).
I'm British originally and still hold a deep love for the country of my birth but to be honest I am almost as shocked at the state of this nation at the moment as I was by my accident.
Prices are through the roof. The only medical attention I could get that didn't require at least 14 hours' wait was a private appointment with an Oxford GP, which cost $400. The rail system is an absolute mess with industrial action, overtime bans and engineering works at weekends. So the excellent First Class Eurail passes we have secured to help us get around are a mixed blessing.
Yesterday's journey between Oxford and Bury St Edmunds required three trains, a cross London tube ride and a bus replacement service, with a total journey time of six hours. Not much fun when in good physical state and travelling with luggage and teenagers but, when moving and even breathing is painful, a lot harder to take.
There are three more long train journeys ahead, to the Sussex coast, from there up to Manchester and then back to London Luton airport to catch an Easyjet flight to Santorini, in a week's time. We have to work around overtime bans and a rail strike next Friday and Saturday.
The rail and tube workers join junior doctors, consultants and other healthcare professionals in recent strike action. The National Health Service released figures last month stating that almost 1 million appointments had been lost since the industrial action began. Other recent strikes include teachers, postal workers, border force officers, ambulance staff, midwives, firefighters, refuse collectors and even barristers.
Travelling here, for the first time in four years, I'm struck by a state of nervy chaos and general depression. Not even the adage "carry on and drink tea" seems to be working for people.
It makes me very sad. This is a beautiful country, as the first four days of travelling along the River Thames reminded me, full of wonderful, talented people. As my 13-year-old has noted, the green fields here are a deeper hue than any back in Australia, and those thousand-year-old villages and rural cottages that pepper the countryside are so beguiling. History and high level culture are everywhere.
The promises made by those advocating Brexit in 2016 have fallen utterly flat, and 13 years of successive Conservative government have demoralised and isolated this country. Like me, it is badly bruised and hurting, and looking for a solution to a world of pains.
