These various zippings were enacted by an increasingly demonic Franz. Second by second he grew wilder, the wisps of white hair rising from his head, his mouth widening into a scarlet satyr’s grin. And soon he was dancing on the table, stripped down to his underpants and socks and a borrowed polka-dot bow tie. It was at this point that Angela did the first of her farmyard imitations – a rooster, I suppose it must have been. ‘Don’t do that, Enj,’ Colin said. Still utterly sedate, Vivien looked on with unconcern.

Back in his chair, Franz told us about his brother Alfonso who spent five days a week locked up in Hillcrest – the Adelaide lunatic asylum – but was let out at weekends. ‘I ought to warn you that he is known to be partial to a run down to the Barossa,’ he warned us. Five minutes later he left the room; and five minutes after that Alfonso turned up in Angela’s nightie and a sort of yarmulka made from a crocheted doily, waving a plastic fan. ‘Good evening, I’m Alfonso, the mad brother,’ he said.

All in all this struck me as a novel and possibly highly remedial method of dealing with schizophrenia: one simply brought the other half of one’s riven personality out with one; one took one’s dopplegänger to the party. ‘Good evening, Alfonso,’ I said. Since I was for it, I had to go all the way with it.

Angela too had another name she wanted us to know her by. ‘I’m Louis the fly,’ she sang, remembering an old Australian fly-spray jingle. ‘I’m big and mean and mighty unclean. Straight from rubbish tip to you. I’m Louis the fly.’

‘Aw no, Enj,’ Colin said.

It would be wrong to say that the evening wasn’t going the way Colin wanted it; he laughed, he hummed to himself, he uncorked bottle after bottle, discoursing not upon their cheeky little personalities but their relation to the whole history of winemaking in the Barossa – ‘This is one of the very last Cabernets that Henschke made before he was found murdered in his bed,’ he announced at one point. But I could tell that there was an element he considered missing from the dinner party. I think it was culture. I couldn’t see why else, amid so much din, he kept putting Pavarotti on the record player. It drove Angela mad at last. She tore it off the turntable and replaced it with the Rhinelanders’ ‘Thirty All Time German Favourites’. One thing led inevitably to another. As non-Lutherans living in a tightly knit Lutheran community, Angela (the fly) and Colin, and Vivien and Franz/Alfonso, clearly needed regular surreptitious release; notwithstanding their high regard for their neighbours, they required an outlet for their feelings. That was the only reason we all ended up doing that John Cleese impersonation I have already alluded to. As soon as we’d exhausted it, Angela remembered another one she was good at. ‘Basil!’ she screamed.