I grew to like Glenelg in the few days we were there. It possessed a refined seediness, a snappy sort of decrepitude which came from its being part city and part seaside, part amusement park and part retirement spa. There were gaudy shops by the seafront where you could buy shells and postcards which showed naked beach girls and said, ‘All the sun and all the tit,/Is the reason why I haven’t writ.’ But there were also good delicatessens and boutiques patronized by smart elderly women who still retained their European accents. It rained for most of our stay, so there were no sunbathers on the beach; instead it became, as a beach should only ever be, a place for the acutely distressed. People wept on it. Priests told their beads on it. Others talked obsessively to themselves on it. Through the window of our converted chapel I even saw a young man tear his hair on it. And every morning at the same time a stern and lonely woman in her eighties – a retired headmistress indubitably – arrived with a plastic bag of crumbs which she would not distribute until all the seagulls on the beach were lined up like a class of first formers, still and silent and attentive, with their wings pinned rigidly to their sides and their beaks shut.

But the most distinctive feature of Glenelg was its trams – marvels of polished creaking timbers, inexplicable silver toggles, leather hanging straps, and seats whose swinging back rests enabled them, like the name Glenelg itself, to face in both directions. You could catch a tram from Glenelg to Adelaide or from Adelaide to Glenelg; there were no alternative routes. Though of course there was nothing to prevent you getting off at any stop in-between. I trammed it conscientiously into Adelaide each day so that the city should not charge me with indifference, but I can’t say that I ever fell in love with it. I found it wedded rather too literal-mindedly to each side of its split personality. It was a writers’ city and so it had too many bookshops; it was a Grand Prix circuit and so everyone drove like Alain Prost. The way to die in Adelaide is to walk out into the traffic reading.