One of the enduring benefits of emigrating at an early age is that you are not expected to attend school reunions; a benefit all the greater if the school you attended is in a city long synonymous with rain and grime, and now also famous for its gun crime. Why, then, have I flown halfway round the planet to attend a Manchester Grammar Old Boys dinner? Because if there’s one school reunion you should attend it’s probably the one that marks the school’s 500th birthday.

It’s a black tie affair, and after we have lied about how good we all look the conversation turns to one of the school’s less flattering dress codes; the one that forbade the wearing of any kind of costume in the swimming pool. This rule – which applied not just to the puny, pubescent student body but also the flabby, hairy staff members supervising it – was not discontinued until a few years after I left, and then presumably only in anticipation of class actions brought by psychologically damaged old Mancunians. (I hardly need tell Speccie readers that people from Manchester are Mancunians but you’d be surprised how many times I have had to explain – especially in America – that I am not a Manchurian.)

Many of the younger people I talk to at the dinner have visited Australia, and those that haven’t tell me it’s on their bucket list. But those within kicking distance of the bucket ask me the kind of questions which suggest that their preconceptions about the country derive from memories of Skippy, Crocodile Dundee and the UK Fosters campaign which inspired it (created by the editor of this magazine, as it happens). Seeing the excitement in their rheumy eyes I gloss over the quotidian mundanity of suburban Sydney life, and big up my very limited experience of the Australia I know they’d rather hear about: the funnel-webs, the shark-nets, the duck-billed platitudes.

Barry Humphries, a man who has done as much as anyone to deconstruct the national stereotype, was the first Aussie I ever met, and Manchester is where I met him. When his An Evening’s Intercourse came to the city’s Palace Theatre I was a very junior copywriter at the ad agency which was asked to make some radio commercials for it. Mr Humphries, his agent told us, might even appear in these ads himself if he liked the scripts enough. Seeing this as if not a fast-track to Hollywood then at least a way out of Manchester, I lobbied hard for the job, and probably put more effort into those scripts than any project since. They were duly sent off to the agent, and evidently liked, because a week later the great man walked into the recording studio we had booked. He wore, if memory serves, an elegant three-piece Prince of Wales check suit, and he chatted very charmingly for a few minutes while final technical adjustments were made. Then he went into the booth and proceeded to improvise three 30 second Dame Edna monologues which bore not the slightest resemblance to the ones I’d written. It has to be said they were also much funnier than mine, and I have always consoled myself with the possibility that I might be the only person ever to have seen him doing his most famous character dressed as a man.

Not long after I first arrived in Australia I saw a poster saying ‘Manchester $19.99!’ Having paid rather more than that for my Air Albania goat-and-chicken-class one-way ticket, and having no intention then of ever going back, I was doubly relieved to learn that in Australia ‘Manchester’ is a generic term for bed linen – a legacy of the commanding role the city had in Britain’s cotton industry in the days of Empire. Interestingly enough, in Canada, where I have also lived, I’ve only ever heard people refer to bed linen as, er, bed linen.

To Knutsford. The half-timbered, thatched-roofed Cheshire market town where I was born may sound like a Beatrix Potter confection, but the name has serious historic provenance. About 300 years before my school was founded an English King, Canute, forded a river there. Canute’s ford, see? Pedants are always quick to point out, however, that the monarch in question was actually called Cnut, not Canute. So it was presumably only to avoid future typographical embarrassment that the locals decided not to call the place Cnutsford.