He wasn’t the only person on the Queequeg who found it hard to concentrate in proximity to so much worldly success. The ritual of gawping at the houses of the rich and famous – or rather, hereabouts, the rich therefore famous – was entered into with the same zombie-reverence by everyone on board. Barristers buckled at the knees. A pair of hard-bitten estate agents sitting on the prow like mastheads sighed like first-time buyers. Even Geoff Gibbs, Dean of the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts and the equal, normally, of Oscar Wilde as to wit and Charles Laughton as to presence, even he seemed to lose his theatrical drawl and to abandon his bohemianism every time we inched by another ten million dollar water ranch. Names familiar to me from Ros’s stories of growing up in Perth cropped up continually; names of ordinarily clever and energetic boys who had made their way, by hook or by crook, to the water’s edge. For there, achievement is at last palpable and indisputable – like a numbered seat on Olympus.

Except that where Olympus was impossibly remote, a hierarchy not for mortal men to aspire to, the Swan River is tormentingly proximate. And it is that – the sheer apparent accessibility of all the symbols of success – which holds the entire population of Perth in thrall. It seems that you need only reach out your hand to receive whatever is your fancy. ‘I think I’ll have that’, you feel it is quite within the bounds of reason and probability to decide. It is an insidiously inviting city. ‘Stop here and buy me,’ it appears to say. ‘Plenty of others have, why shouldn’t you?’

In London it is clear what is and what is not for you. The city knows better than to rouse unrealizable desires. But Perth palters with your hopes like a provincial cocotte.