One isn’t always so lucky with people who have a reputation for lunacy, but Franz did indeed turn out to lack the usual restraints. Though he began normally enough, with stories of his experiences as a businessman/chef. ‘So I took over this absolutely run-down restaurant,’ he explained, ‘famous throughout the Barossa for its appalling décor, atrocious cooking, and unbelievable overpricing. I killed myself doing it up, changing the menu, all that – and who do you think my first customer was? A woman who’d been to it in the old days and had brought a whole coachload of people down from Queensland specifically to witness at first hand everything that she’d described to them. She was furious when she saw what I’d done. “My God, you’ve changed it!” she screamed. “I’ve come thousands of miles to see this again and you’ve changed it!”’ His next problem was staff. ‘I employed an English woman. As an assistant. Only she didn’t – assist me. I had to bribe her before she’d undertake a single task. She just wouldn’t. I had to renegotiate her wages and conditions of employment every day, before she would. Whenever I asked her to do anything she’d say, “Oh, oh, this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.” So I had to do everything myself. She stood at the sink, her back to the business. Drying the same fork. First I took the orders and then it would be – ZIP – into the kitchen, and – ZIP – buttering the scones, and – ZIP – over to the soup, and then – ZIP ZIP – back out into the restaurant again, and – ZIP ZIP ZIP – “Here you are, madam, I take it everything is to your requirements?”’

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.