I’m not sure how you can monitor these things but I have a suspicion that Australia has far more street clowns per head of population than it ought to have. Should that ever turn out to be a verifiable fact I would ascribe it to the national difficulty around aggression. Each man’s everyday right to be as rude as he needs to be to someone else has been interfered with in this country, partly by the mateship fallacy, and partly by the myth of social easy-goingness – ‘She’ll be right. No worries.’ But ordinary hostility will out, just as surely as domestic violence. Hence the harlequin. In an openly aggressive country like England a man does not need to paint his face and wear parti-coloured overalls in order to ease his feelings.

A half-hour later, as I was driving out of Fremantle, I almost knocked him down at an intersection. He was riding a wobbly bicycle, swivelling around on the saddle to see who was looking at him. Some primitive impulse of which I am not entirely proud caused me to apply the brakes. It will go against me in the final count.

‘When you’re in Pert you gotta eat garlic prawns at te Witch’s Cauldron,’ Henri had advised me. ‘You like garlic prawns?’

‘Mad about them,’ I admitted.

‘You like a lotta garlic?’

‘Oodles.’

Henri had cast his eyes heaven wards and kissed his lips at me. ‘Then go to te Witch’s Cauldron and ask to see te chef and say Henri sent you.’

Which was more or less what we intended to do, once we’d returned our hire car and cleaned up a bit, except that finding a taxi to take us to Subiaco on a Sunday evening wasn’t proving all that easy. By eight-fifteen Perth was dark and deserted. I don’t know whether the street lights had actually been dimmed but there was no mistaking the unvoiced preference of the city fathers for us to be at home and in bed at such a time. We walked slowly up Mill Street towards St George’s Terrace where we at last saw a cab and attempted to flag it down. But it was behaving strangely. It stopped, started, reversed at speed through the traffic lights, seemed to be coming our way, and then drove abruptly off again. As we rounded the corner, cursing, we saw a body lying face down and motionless in the road. No one else was on the streets. Although this was a main thoroughfare not a single car passed us, neither one way nor the other. There was just us and the body. And the ineffective street lamps.