I am seated in the departure lounge at Malpensa airport, Milan. The Japanese are shopping at the Gucci outlet, I am eating a dry sandwich. I am at the end of what is possibly the shortest "free" holiday possible, a transit flight with overnight stay in a city that was once home - Milan.

As soon as we boarded the plane at Kastrup airport in Copenhagen I knew I was back in "made in Italy". The gap-toothed steward stood at the door grinning at every pretty Danish blonde, and even at every average blonde under the age of 60, his lazy eyelids nudging up and down, surreptitiously trailing the flat behind as he moved down the aisles, happy to be alive (or had he died and gone to blonde heaven?).

Once airborne, we were treated to the delights of the perennially sultry Italian airhostess and the lackadaisical steward walking up and down the aisle speaking loudly about the people on board, quite convinced that no one could understand Italian. This was a source of much amusement for me as I half-listened to the Danish man from Jutland telling me about a remote village in Lombardy where cat is considered a tasty meal. Silly me, I thought it was just a substitute for rabbit.

And then into Italy we went, eyes gazing up and down and right back at you, women chattering violently on their cell phones, a marathon of hot, nasal wind all the way to Cadorna Station from Malpensa airport, a 40-minute journey, where travelling salesmen smile at you when you forget your computer on the smoking bench, offering you their visiting card and similar stories of memory failure and loss.

And just like that I was in the back of a taxi driving through Milan, warm and calm in the early spring night. The erudite editor of the art magazine Boiler once told me that nostalgia must be killed, but here I was overwhelmed by the dreaded N - in a way that filled me with silly excitement at the thought of being back and walking familiar streets and drinking the oversized mojitos at Cape Town on Via Vigevano.

This was the world's shortest holiday allowed, and I didn't have much time to tick off all the names and places on my nostalgia-to-do-and-kill list, so I slipped into auto pilot and headed via the tram to the corner I know best, where many a night had been spent in deep and not so deep, conversation.

In one night I managed to accidentally bump into four old faces, and not meet any of the people I had made tentative appointments with. I sat with my phone in my hand wondering whether to call them, to enquire what had happened, but in the end I decided to let the sleeping Italians roll over and rub their warm, well-fed bellies and lie...

As the night drew to an end, Edgar the Colombian cool cat and I grabbed a slice of gooey pizza and headed home to Via Spartaco, a stone's throwaway from the Prada HQ.

In the morning we headed down to Bidilo to sip on a fine Americano, and eat panini filled with good, fresh prosciutto crudo and mild cheese. In walked the fashionistas and posers, in glided a freshly brushed Afghan hound, followed by a shiny, black Labrador, the owners all suitably snooty in their feigned attempts to ignore any attention the fine dogs might be enjoying.

And that was it, holiday over, total expenditure (minus ticket) €60, including the train to and from Malpensa airport. Now, I am sitting here at the airport, delayed and bored, waiting to get home to a table laden with fine food, around which we shall sit and enjoy simultaneous chatter. The real joy of home is coming home, when the horreur du domicile is forgotten and only the pleasure of the familiar fills the room, for it is in leaving that home that it is finally understood.

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