I was flying home to London from Australia last weekend when a nice man from Qantas asked me to put a name tag on my suitcase during a stopover in Dubai. “This pen of yours is fantastic,” I gushed as I scrawled my name on the tag with one of my favourite types of pen. “Thanks,” he said. “But it’s actually yours.” Disturbingly, it was. In my jet-lagged stupor, I had somehow managed to forget I had fished it out of my bag only minutes earlier.
In my defence I had just flown overnight from Melbourne for 14 sleepless hours, strapped upright in a seat beside a row of sobbing infants. But it was a worrying moment considering that this week, in an awful case of bad timing, I am due to make another day-long flight, to the bottom tip of Chile for work. Even for someone from Australia, a nation of long-haul specialists, these back-to-back treks looked daunting. So I decided to take stock of all the jet lag tips that truly work, as opposed to the vast load of twaddle on the topic.
Starting with the latter, it is astonishing how often people are still advised to prepare for a big flight as if they were Olympic athletes or jobless. The UK’s National Health Service is a typical offender. Its jet lag page blithely suggests flyers “start going to bed and getting up an hour or two earlier or later than usual, in line with the time of your destination”.