I think now that it must have been a dream. There is always a tendency to confuse dream and reality when working through the processes of jet lag; but what I saw at the Gabba was certainly real enough. What seems distinctly unreal is my memory of the Ashes summer of 2005. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it didn’t really happen at all.

Watching England play cricket at the Gabba in Brisbane over the first two days of the most eagerly awaited Test match series in history was exactly how watching England play cricket against Australia is supposed to be. The Australians were swaggering, smugly bullying, confident to the point of parody. The English were little, weak and helpless.

It’s what we know, it’s what we expect, it’s always been that way. England are just not expected to do well against Australia. It makes for uncomfortable viewing for a visiting Englishman, because Australians are not generally inclined to take their sport with dash of irony. It’s all too terribly real for them: in Australia, they don’t have history, they have sport.

What seems amazing, after that tautological exhibition of Australian dominance on the first two days of the series, is that England won the series, and with it the Ashes, 14 months ago. How on Earth could that have happened? In what world could England ever have beaten Australia?

Back then, the England players were confident, proud, fast: they had plans and faith that they would work. It was Australia who looked rattled, inclined to self-doubt, filled with the feeling that the world was locked in a conspiracy against them. Australia seemed old and tired: England looked young and free.

How can that have been? And how could that feeling have been lost so quickly? The only answer is that it really was a dream: that 2005 never happened: that Andrew Flintoff did not work miracles: that the England team did not play out of their skin.

It was one of those classic reversal dreams, in which the dream is the exact opposite of reality. England could surely only have beaten Australia in Looking-Glass Land.

• Of course, by the time you’re reading this, the third day, as yet unseen by me, will be over. England might have played superbly; everything might be completely different. That is the problem of writing from the wrong timezone: the reader always knows more than the writer. That’s a disconcerting sensation (and, I might add, a deeply familiar one, something I have felt in many different timezones, including our own).

  So I will look pretty silly if England are now 500 for three. Ah well: this is such stuff as dreams are made on.

• The Ashes build-up was knocked off the back pages here by the retirement of Ian Thorpe, the Australian swimmer called “the Thorpedo” — that’s right, the one with the feet. His size 17s gave rise to the ludicrous notion that he was good because he had big feet — as if heart and mind and discipline and appetite and skill and courage had nothing to do with it.

  But certainly, Thorpe is perfectly evolved for swimming: with his build and his strength, he is Homo aquaticus. I have watched Thorpe and counted the strokes he makes: four fewer per length than any of his rivals. In that languid, almost indolent glide you find his power: size 17s kicking the water into Guinness.

  Thorpe has retired at the age of 24 because the desire has gone: and so Australia celebrated a national hero who has his finest hour at the Sydney Olympics of 2000: three goals and two silvers.

  There have long been rumours that Thorpe is gay (which, incidentally, he has rebutted). For one thing, he designed a line of men’s underwear. But no one has seriously tried to find out if it’s true. No journo has tried to set him up, to find a kiss-and-teller. Thorpe has always been treated with respect bordering on awe.

  Now I keep wondering: is this non-invasion of the question of Thorpe’s sexuality a matter of national squeamishness: and with it the reluctance to spoil a sporting icon? Is it a piece of prudery? Or does it represent a genuine tolerance: a sense of so-what-if-he-is? I dare say there is a little of both.

  But it is perhaps significant that Australia did produce Ian Roberts: a rugby league player who came out as gay and went on to play for another four years — and won nothing but respect for his courage. Perhaps in Australia you really can be younger and freer than you are in Britain.