With the assistance of a computer-savvy friend an airline ticket was found to transport me from Sydney to London. Staggeringly expensive, it was still marginally less than the ones I’d found online by myself. The only problem seemed to be that there was a short stop-over in San Francisco. I knew I would have to go through passport control there and had problems in the past with my American visa; once my name was punched into the computer it was revealed I had been to a film festival in Iran in 2014.