Two of the leftfooters in question (that’s assuming Rod was right) were Ian, a prodigiously slow-talking general practitioner, and his wife Violet. Where Rod had dressed for the occasion in socks that were too long and too white, and shorts that were too tight and too much the colour of custard, Ian had made no nautical concessions to his wardrobe whatsoever. He sat with his back against the rail of the imperceptibly moving yacht, his knees together, in carefully pressed trousers and a neat short-sleeved khaki shirt. He told me that he was half-Indian but had never been to India. ‘I want to see new places,’ he said, leaving enough time to pop to India and back between each word. He had recently returned from a tour of Egypt and Israel in one of which, from atop some holy mountain or other, he and Violet had seen in the New Year. It was an experience which looked likely to spoil them for all other New Years. ‘That’s the only time I’ve felt the mystical significance of it all,’ Violet said.

‘You leftfooters are all the same,’ Rod quipped. His Adam’s apple bulged in his throat like a mongoose in the windpipe of a python.

Ian and Violet were concerned that I shouldn’t suppose, just because they’d been to the Middle East, that they had money to throw away. ‘It costs us ten thousand dollars a year to send our three kids to school,’ they told me, both separately and in chorus, at various times throughout the day. I’m pleased to say that I knew enough about Perth already not to ask why it was necessary that their children should be educated privately.

I grew attached to Violet. She was abundant and toothily good-looking and stuffed a mean mustard sausage – ‘By hand,’ she told me – and was even reckless in a careful West Australian sort of way. She too went in for a highly stylized slowness of delivery, though in her case I like to think that that was simply a technique for maintaining control over herself. I’d come across this mock moronic drawl before, especially amongst Melbourne Catholic intellectuals who like to savour superlatives, but the Perth version was even more deliberately oblivious to time. So much so that you could never be entirely certain that you weren’t being treated with devastatingly measured irony. It’s possible, therefore, that Ian and Violet had their way with me aboard the Queequeg that afternoon, and later on in their pool laughed between themselves at how much of his life an Englishman could be charmed into throwing away waiting for their simple answers to his simple questions.