to you all! ",Why did you go to Thursday Island?," people ask me. "Because it's there," I reply. "But so are your comfortable slippers and the TV remote." Q.E.D., I think. I may have been struck down with what psychoanalysts refer to as G.T.D.S.B.S. syndrome (* Going to do something a bit silly syndrome - source: Freud, Dreams and the Unconscious, published 1896), or it may simply have been a wish to revisit one of the many odd and fascinating places I used to live and work in - and they don't come any odder than T.I.! There are two words I don't want to find myself uttering as an old man, and they are "If only ...". If only. We all have our own "if onlys". If only we had studied harder; if only we had stuck with that job ..." My trip to T.I. was to eliminate one "if only" and to confirm in my own mind that I couldn't have stayed much longer on the island even if my then boss, Cec Burgess, had been less of a crotchety old bastard. This then is the journal of my journey to T.I. and into my own past:   next page ===>