When suicide bombers struck Brussels, I was travelling far from home, in southern Italy. News of the terrorist attacks left me with the familiar feeling of revulsion, fury and sorrow for those people blown to pieces for the sake of someone's warped ideology.
But they also evoked in me something new, a sense of vulnerability, for within days I would board a series of flights from Reggio Calabria to Rome to Abu Dhabi and then Sydney.
I would stand at check-in counters like those victims at Brussels Airport had done; I would disgorge the contents of my backpack at security checkpoints, watch as other travellers were forced to discard everyday items — bottles of water and shampoo and wine, objects transformed into evil contraband in this age of terrorism.
I would spend long hours in aeroplane cabins, crammed alongside passengers who might well nurture malicious intentions towards their fellow-travellers, who might well have smuggled on board a bottle of water with which to make a bomb, a Stanley knife with which to slit the pilot's throat, a fake bomb vest with which to stage a hijacking.
For if terrorists could infiltrate a supposedly secure, world-class European airport then surely no place in the world was safe.
And if the savages who masterminded these attacks could impinge so forcefully on the psyche of a woman travelling in a remote corner of southern Europe, far from any terrorist activity, then they had achieved what they had set out to do: spread fear and distrust far beyond the site of their attacks, across countries and continents and oceans so that eventually the whole world would be infected.
I was reminded at this moment of the Paris attacks that occurred last November, and which sent parents at my daughter's school into a fit of panic. A group of students was set to fly from Sydney to Paris on New Year's Eve and to travel on to Spain a few days later as part of an arts and language tour.
The school had been planning the trip for more than a year; many students had found part-time work to finance the journey — for some, this would be their first overseas trip; we parents manned Bunnings barbecues all year long to raise funds for additional activities.
"If the savages who masterminded these attacks could impinge so forcefully on the psyche of a woman travelling in a remote corner of southern Europe, then they