Homer wrote in The Odyssey of The Land of the Lotus-Eaters, a place where people take up a narcotic lotus and fall into addiction at the expense of their past and future. It’s an analogy for many things – not least, I think, of the temptation to expunge responsibility and remain a child. My lotus was my working holiday in London.

At first glance there is something oddly perverse about the pairing of ‘Working’ and ‘Holiday’ on those British visa forms. Surely, one thinks, the embassy has got it wrong. Surely a holiday denotes a stretch of time absent of work, and work denotes a stretch of time absent of holiday. Surely, together, they cancel each other out and you’re simply left lying in bed wondering what it is you’re supposed to be doing.

But it quickly becomes clear that Holiday is almost certainly a misnomer. Somebody’s made a typo. Call the embassy. Because shouldn’t it really say something like Working Travel Experience? Anybody who’s ever been ferried to the beach by their parents and then gone backpacking with friends on a budget will know what I mean. Holiday and travel are often different kettles of fish: holiday is automatic, safe, battered flake with chips; travel is cast from rough clay and boiled over an open fire, and the fish in this case are piranhas waiting to bite off your extremities.

So with this in mind, why bother with the oxymoron that is the Working Holiday? Semantics aside, the obvious answer is, of course, because it’s fun. It’s fun to experience a different environment, to stretch out your cultural legs and match three-dimensional reality with movie fantasy, a holiday from life as you know it.

One reason young Aussies flock to London depends more on the Working aspect of the supposed holiday. Sarah, a friend of mine, took the opportunity to go to London and cement her ambition as an interior designer. Something indelible remains of the image of Australia as a bucolic backwater, devoid of satisfying jobs, against which the allure of international opportunity is a strong temptation.

Most interesting, however, is the Working Holiday as a convenient diversionary tactic. I speak from experience here. Those late teenage years when you find yourself suddenly considered an adult, independent, can seem nebulous and lacking in forward motion. Without university or any reasonable short-term goals, it’s easy to stagnate in a haze of anxious indecision. A Working Holiday provides an alibi for two years of meandering or fantasising, an escape clause from the pressures of career and responsibility.

This was my own tacit thinking when I grabbed a visa and headed for London, selected for its proximity to Europe as well as its appearance of a cultural Mecca. All my favourite writers had intimate experience with London – to live there, even for a short period, seemed like an opportunity to connect with like-minded people in an environment I found exhilarating. Australia and I had never quite got along in this respect; I hoped London would prove a better fit. This led to a naïve imagining of myself as a sort of Dorian Gray, capable of stowing away my cardinal Australianess in favour of something else, acquired, controllable and distinctly European (something to do with confidence, perhaps). I reasoned that if you control the base elements you’ve gone a long way to controlling outcomes. This is only a short step from feeling like your future’s being shaped rather than shaping you.

My goal was quickly decided then: to use the Working Holiday as an opportunity to reconfigure myself – everything else would hopefully follow in painless compliance. So I got a room in a share-house near Holland Park. I landed an interesting job working the world-class museum circuit thanks to a prominent agency that earned more from my exertions than I did. While on assignment I distributed tickets beneath a Chihuly chandelier. I greeted John Galliano in a Vivienne Westwood retrospective. I watched a technician maintain the priceless lapidary of the Rosetta Stone while my hippie boss, in candid admission, declared that though he may have been high at the time, he did in fact dance in a nightclub with both of the Minogue sisters simultaneously. Basically, I submerged myself in a series of low-responsibility positions that fostered a feeling of achievement while actually leaving me in the same limbo of aimlessness that had sent me abroad in the first place. I awoke each morning excited, glad to be a Londoner, but increasingly aware that I was wearing a costume in a game that could never really be won.

I suspect it’s not until the day your visa expires, however, that you realise just how much you’ve come to rely on the specious sense of achievement. With the parents remarking on how much your accent’s changed, and the formidable approach of an uncertain future, it’s easy to feel nostalgically attached to a surrogate home where everything’s ‘easier.’ Certainly on this point I’m not alone – take Nadine, for example, a friend who found herself illegal and handing out nightclub flyers in a vain attempt to stay an unofficial citizen. Or Sarah, the interior designer: ‘I felt I had made a life for myself in London and that I had fully immersed myself into my life, my work and my friends,’ she says. ‘I was happy and I was not ready to come home. I did not want to come home . . . to step back in to my old life.’

For a while the lotus consumed my thoughts; this unfettered life in London was my real life; the Australian me was all a prologue, a test-run. For myself and others who take the visa as a diversionary tactic, it’s easy to fall for this illusion, and it can last long after you’ve made the obligatory voyage home. Even now I miss London – in terrible, homesick pangs – but I’ve gained valuable perspective in retrospect. I didn’t lose the experience gained in England on the return flight to Sydney. If anything, it led me to seek out similarities here and I’ve found things in places I wouldn’t otherwise have thought to look. As with Sarah, now working in interior design in Melbourne, the Working Holiday actually illuminated an entirely new direction. ‘It made me a better person – I only had to let it go and embrace the uncertain future to realise that.’