‘Beautiful tables – very popular with boys.’ He sat at one and gestured me to look through the glass at his knees. ‘’Scuse me,’ he said to Ros. ‘Girls sit here, boys look through. Very popular. Eh?’

Before we left he warned us to be careful of Arab terrorists on the plane back to London. There was even more scorn on his face when he pronounced the word Arab than when he’d shaped the wine glass. He gave us a demonstration of how you look out for terrorists without drawing attention to yourself. It required a drop into something between catalepsy and epilepsy – the head stayed rigid but the eyes rolled like a goanna’s. Come the hijack you’d be the first to go.

‘I’ll try it,’ I promised.

But terrorists weren’t the main worry right now. I was still brooding about a particular paragraph in the Royal Automobile Association’s safety and survival literature.

STAY WITH THE VEHICLE – If you have followed the standard advice of leaving word at settlements as to where you are going, a search party will come out eventually, and the vehicles will be far easier to find than isolated human beings in the vastness of the outback landscape.

Eventually?

Glenelg on the morning I went to pick up the campervan resembled Yarmouth the day Steerforth was washed ashore. A wild grey sea boomed upon the beach. A cold rain that was half salt-spray blew through the streets. On the Esplanade a couple of policemen sat in a squad car with its wipers on, watching the waves. Through the mist the tram appeared uncertainly, blinking like an old sea serpent. A number of war veterans in the regalia of remembrance staggered aboard, their medals and ribbons dripping, for this was also Anzac Day, the anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli, and survivors of that and other horrors were gathering for the great parade through the city. Had it not been for my appointment with Bill Richards, whose van I was collecting, I would have stayed in Adelaide for the morning and watched the march. Already, hours before they were due to walk to the Cross of Sacrifice, old battalions were reforming, Poles, Canadians, Maltese, Greeks in long white pleated skirts, all gathering behind their several banners. In the rain a solitary piper was tuning up. The usual feelings assailed me. There was no escape from the rhetoric. However gross the plot, you couldn’t deny the players.