We took an unhurried seafood lunch – I mean scallops and prawns and calimari, not Dover sole – in the King’s Park restaurant, where I marvelled at the quaint formality, the awkward and unaccustomed air, of our fellow diners. I estimated that it must have been the 1950s since I’d last seen people eating out with such apparent uncertainty as to the conventions. I’d never been to New Zealand but I guessed that public dining was still like this there also. I found the slowness and the reserve rather soothing. I normally gallop my food down as if I have something terribly urgent to do afterwards. Today, surrounded by largely elderly people in Harris Tweed jackets and funereal hats, I found myself taking as long to swallow the elbow of a prawn as I would usually devote to a whole shoulder of lamb.

This was just the start of Perth’s deceleration of all my functions. By the time I was ready to leave I too would be moving like a sloth, my limbs heavy with contentment, my mind drugged with the curiously satisfying knowledge that the nearest city was well over three thousand kilometres away.

While we were eating we saw the first of our Easter brides. This one arrived at the entrance to the restaurant in a taxi, hard on the heels of the groom in the taxi in front. The groom turned out to be blind and had to be led up the steps by his future wife. It is always a touching sight, a blind man dressed for a special occasion. The bride hung on to him tightly and appeared to whisper some words of encouragement in his ear. The moment they began their climb the taxi drivers removed the white bridal decorations from their cabs and drove off. There is no end to the melancholy of these sunny old-fashioned Australian cities.

After lunch we walked through the park down to the river. Cyclists continued to pass us, ringing and smiling. I was struck by how democratically landscaped the Swan was, how accessible to pedestrians it had been made, and how little justice was done it by calling it a river at all, since at this point of its journey it swelled and fingered the city like a harbour.