Long gone are the days my buffed shiny black leather shoes clopped and strutted up the Paris end of Collins Street, cashmere Italian label designer suit contouring over my broad held shoulders giving strength and fortitude in my step, a loft in my chest and an importance and valour rising like the elevator swooshing up 40 floors of the high prominent tower.

Up on high, sun glistening through the frosty bespeckled windows, eyes lightly squinted as the glare hit the floor to ceiling glass, my toes abut, nose and lips all but pressed against it, my neck tie dangling from its broad half-windsor knot, mouth craving the cool crisp oxygen swirling amongst the clouds on the other side of the hardened glass.

A decade or more since, it’s now 8.30am Thursday on a bright winter’s morning, barely 10c in the air, and anymore I don’t even know who I was standing at that window, seemingly a foreign life lived.

My boardshorts contour over my thighs, lightly motioning as the black shiny fins effortlessly caress the cool 13c sea in the calm silence of the Southern Ocean waters.

The light northerly wind presses down on the sea surface, the soft south-westerly swell sent from Antarctica contented in its rare muted state. Bright green carpets, sashes of golden yellow, flickers of brown, pink and white pass beneath me, bare skin delighting in the flow of this sheer blue liquid enveloping me, nose and eyes hidden behind the black and clear mask that is my window to this underwater theatre.