‘They really protect you.’ She hits the word ‘protect’ a little hard and holds the Chapstick upright in her hand as if it’s a miniature wand from The Lord of the Rings. She looks as if she may suffer a grand mal seizure unless she somehow manages to get the Chapstick into Batboy’s backpack.

‘I really don’t need the Chapstick,’ replies Batboy, amiably enough.

‘Now come along,’ says The Space Cadet, dancing in between them and using the same faux-American accent. ‘Let’s not have a fight just before our little boy goes.’

The Space Cadet thinks he’s enormously funny. I think he may be right.

‘Well okay,’ says Jocasta finally. ‘You can always buy one overseas, once you’re there.’

I can see her line of thought: the boy is about to handle ten weeks in a rural village, bang in the middle of rural Germany. It will be winter, his host family doesn’t speak English and a bus passes only once a day. Given all this, lip care may be the least of his worries.

Not that the family doesn’t sound wonderful—even if they do live a very isolated, traditional life, quite different from anything Batboy has experienced before. His host brother has been emailing him every day, describing the farm, the motorbikes and the animals. Only a few days back he emailed very excitedly: ‘Good news, visiting brother! Father says we will hold off the slaughtering of the cow until the day you arrive.’

Batboy took the news surprisingly well. I guess there’s no cure for jetlag like a few hours of playful cow butchering. Already he has been told about how they have their own pigs, from which they make their own sausages, and chickens which they slaughter for Sunday lunch. Either he’ll come home twice the size and wearing Lederhosen; or as a rake-thin vegetarian.

Certainly he’ll come back Lutheran. When we first received details of his host family, we sneakily put them into Google, together with the name of the nearest village. What came up was a village diary, showing that their house was used every Tuesday for meetings of a local choir. According to our best effort at translation, the family comprises the principal members of the local Evangelical Lutheran Trombone Choir. A picture does form of Christmas Day: Batboy and his host brother working their way through a couple of family pigs, starting at the head and moving down, their Lederhosen tightening as their stomachs expand, while the rest of the family pump away on a trombone rendition of ‘Silent Night’.

I’m momentarily concerned, but they send us a photo and everyone looks reassuringly normal. A friend tells me to ignore the word ‘evangelical’—it just means they are normal Lutherans and not the sort of insane, wild-eyed Protestants you find in certain exotic out-of-the-way places. For instance: Sydney. He is, however, unable to explain neither the religious nor musical point of a choir consisting solely of massed trombones.

Back home, it’s a few hours before departure and Batboy is packing the last of his things. A CD of Australian rock music, an old hardback copy of the poems of C.J. Dennis, two jars of Vegemite and his own body weight in Tim Tams. I go off to work and imagine him taking off. I keep looking at my watch and charting his progress. Above Brisbane now. Cairns. Singapore.

We have dinner, the remaining three of us. There’s not many pots and plates to wash up and I remark on this fact to The Space Cadet, who’s standing beside me as I scrub away, flicking my legs with his tea towel. ‘You know why?’ he says, with all the sensitivity of a younger brother. ‘It’s because that lard-arse isn’t here.’ I glance towards Jocasta, sitting on the couch with a faraway look. I guess she’s also charting Batboy’s progress—a dotted line arching through her mind, stretching from his bedroom to this new world of slaughtered cows, joyful trombones and home-made sausage.

We hosted an exchange student ourselves, only a few months before. Maria from northern Germany survived our odd family, so surely Batboy would survive his hosts.