We settled at last for an establishment which had the fewest fire-breathing dragons painted on its shutters and a promise, at the head of its menu, that we wouldn’t be disappointed in the fresh specialities prepared by Kenny Ong and Tony Mo. A white Caucasian Australian male wearing an aertex shirt with rolled-up sleeves rubbed his chin when we asked for a table, although there were about forty of them, all empty, before agreeing that we might reasonably sit wherever we fancied. Once in our seats we became the responsibility of the head waitress, a tall, pinched, irremediably occidental woman who spoke in what I took to be a Norman dialect and wore a vaguely Nipponese nightie tied in bows across a flat French chest. Her job was only to make us feel uncomfortable. Our actual order was taken by the under-waitress, a new girl being broken in for the season, who had clearly never handed anyone so much as a biscuit in the whole of her life until now. She too was neither an Ong nor a Mo. It’s possible that Kenny and Tony were having a night off, or an off-night, but whatever the reason we were unable to detect a trace of Chinese culinary competence in anything that arrived at our table. Our fish soup was a wet prawn cocktail. Our Chinese vegetables were frozen green peas and carrots. Even the tea we ordered arrived à l’Australien, in breakfast tea-cups and with sugar lumps.

‘China tea!’ I’m afraid I shouted at the waitress. ‘China tea. The way they drink it in China!’

The Frenchwoman hurried over. ‘I can assure sir we serve only in ze very best china,’ she assured me.

A man has to be a fool to let a bad meal depress him, but the town and the food were all of a piece. We should have known better than to try either. After all, we’d lived in North Cornwall for ten years. And we knew that you don’t go looking for good Chinese food there.