'I wouldn't advise Iran or Iraq,' Ian Sangster, my friend and GP, said. 'In fact I wouldn't leave Australia with your recent medical history. You seem to be totally recovered, very fit in fact, given what you've been through. But you never know, and if something went wrong your medicos'd need your bloody medical records.'

'Thanks a lot, Ian. You reckon I should think about somewhere close and calming, like Hobart.'

We were sitting at a table outside the Toxteth Hotel having a late morning drink. Ian was smoking and already well into his first of the two packets he'd smoked every day for thirty years.

'You might think about it. You could look for the graves of your convict ancestors.'

'Did that once, or someone did it for me. A couple ended up in Camperdown cemetery, so they're now under the sod where dogs shit and people do tai chi.'

'Just a suggestion.' He butted his cigarette and stood. 'And another thing, don't go off on your own. Find someone to go with you.'

That was a problem. I had other friends and I had a daughter, but no one I could think of who'd want to up stakes and take off as a travelling companion to someone who'd been knocked about as much as me. Even though I could pay.

I remembered what my mother-a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, piano-thumping descendant of Irish gypsies- used to say when my father, a dour, sober man, bemoaned a difficult circumstance: 'Never you mind, boyo. Something'll turn up.' For her, it mostly did, and right then it did for me when I met my cousin, Patrick.

He'd tracked me down somehow on the internet and when he rang me I was struck by the similarity in our voices. 'I'm your cousin, Cliff,' he said. 'My grandad was your grandma's brother.'

'That right?' I said. 'She had a sister or two, I know, but I never heard of a brother.'

'Yeah, well I gather Grandad was a bit of a black sheep.'

'The way I heard it they were all black sheep. Gypsies.'