When I interviewed the US writer Fran Lebowitz a few months ago, the two things she kept returning to in our conversation were Trump and “the flight”.

Trying to think of the dumbest thing she could compare to Donald Trump, she told me a story about stopping at a servo in Pennsylvania and buying a 50-cent stick of gum. She handed over a dollar before realising that the clerk could not calculate the change because the till was broken.

“And I said to myself: ‘If Donald Trump had to work, this would be Donald Trump behind the counter.’ He’s really stupid. People don’t want to say that because they want to believe that he masterminded this election.”

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Trump might be dumb, she said, but what was unspeakably evil, truly grotesque and unimaginably cruel was “the flight”. She actually shuddered.

The flight Lebowitz was referring to was the long-haul flight people must make to get to Australia. She had just come off it – and the experience had horrified and humbled her.

“I was like a child on the plane, asking the flight attendant, ‘Are we there?’ And she said, ‘Are you nuts? We’ve only been flying for four hours.’ The only people who live in Australia are those who came to Australia and couldn’t face the trip back. I’m actually one of those people.”

This week I did “the flight”, returning from London to Melbourne. Most Australians just accept it as their lot and develop strategies to get through it, usually by means of anaesthesia. Some treat a flight to London as “$2,000 all-you-can-drink”, others numb themselves by watching 12 movies in a row, some will only travel business class – silverware and a wide, leather seat part of the magical thinking needed to survive the days and nights in the air.

When you are going long-haul, it is crucial to remove the conscious, thinking part of your brain so that the reality of spending more than 20 hours sitting in a metal cylinder, 40,000 feet in the air, in too close proximity to strangers, doesn’t cause us a deep, existential panic meaning we would never, ever leave Australia again.

This time I chose to fly to and from London on an Islamic airline that didn’t serve alcohol. I decided to self-medicate with sedatives so that I would spend the 23 hours in the air unconscious. Then, arriving in Melbourne, it would be as though it had never happened because I would not be able to remember anything.

The trip was a hell flight – stopping in Dubai, where we had to get out and do a zombie loop through security, get our bags checked, throw out our water bottles and take off our shoes, and then take our seats again.

Then the plane stopped AGAIN in Brunei. This is the world’s most boring airport. There is one place to eat that has a communist vibe. You can only get a wet-looking meat or week-old spring rolls (trust me, there is no “spring” in the rolls). There is a place where you can buy perfume. And rumours of a coffee shop ... somewhere. That’s it.

No bars, no shops, no WH Smiths, none of the goodies that turn an airport into a shopping mall (more magical thinking). Hello Brunei, boring old friend, I thought, as we stopped for a two-hour layover.

Then an announcement: the flight to Melbourne was delayed by seven hours. There would be more announcements to follow.

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The only problem was that by this stage I had taken so many sedatives I could barely disembark. I had timed my doses wrong. Drool was forming in the corner of my mouth, my arms and legs felt heavy. In the bad airport, it was impossible not to fall back to sleep. There was no bed but there were seats that could be pulled out and made into a nest. I could cover myself in pages of the London Telegraph, a paper with pages as big as bedsheets. And maybe I’d just rest here for a bit, maybe I’d just close my drooping eyelids, maybe I would just curl up in this communist airport and …

When I woke up I felt drowsy and pleasantly dulled before the panic hit me. I had no idea of the time or, for a brief moment, the country. Where was I? The airport was empty. Literally empty. Even the lone perfume seller had abandoned her post. It was like that opening scene in 28 Days Later when the bike courier emerges from a coma to a city emptied of people.

Brigid Delaney (@BrigidWD) my column tomorrow is about taking too many sedatives before a flight and then waking up to this..... pic.twitter.com/QO7oZzt2tu

So this was to be it. There had been some sort of apocalypse while I had been sedated at the airport (had the North Korea thing happened?) and now, as the sole survivor, I would be forced to create a new society in ... Brunei?

Then it dawned on me: the other people in the airport had gone to Melbourne. In my deep sleep, designed to erase consciousness on the hell flight, I had slept through announcements and missed my hell flight – and now I was stuck in the most boring airport in the world. The irony.

Then they came down the stairs from the bad food court. My fellow zoned-out passengers with their doughnut-shaped neck pillows, lank hair and BO.

The airline had given them free spring rolls and grey meat to compensate for the seven-hour delay.

The only thing I had missed was a free meal.