Today is the end of Daylight Saving, when we all get the precious hour that was stolen from us for no good reason back, and we can sleep in one additional hour before we must rise from our slumber and subject ourselves to these terrors.
We rose before dawn the final morning.
When the time came to return, we rose before first light to reach Hastings airport.
From Marib, we rose before dawn, and travelled in conveys of four-by-fours into the Ramlat al Sabatein desert, passing camels, desert foxes, Bedouin and an endless sea of sand dunes caressed by the early morning sun.
Each morning we rose before the sun at 5.30am for a game drive, spotting giraffe, kudu, water buffalo, impala, ostrich, springbok, oryx and, on one occasion, the flash of a black mamba disappearing into the scrub.
It's already late in the day (we rose shortly before 5am for Buddhist meditation and chanting – a compulsory undertaking for temple guests), but Kwan flits energetically about her kitchen, robes fluttering like one of the butterflies in her garden.
"I think we have been down before and we have rose to the challenge," he said.
"Think about all the projects we conceived more than a decade ago, before we knew about rising sea levels, in the name of waterfront revitalization," he went on.
The other young singers, 12-year-old Shaheen Jafargholi and 10-year-old Hollie Steel, were quite good, but as adolescents will have to develop a bit before we see whether they rise to everyone's expectations of their talents.
