Later that evening as we were settling into a chalet on a pleasantly wooded camping ground on the fringes of Atherton, I found a frog in the toilet bowl. Or rather it found me. I flushed the cistern and it leapt out of the water, hung in the air for a second bulging its eyes and kicking its legs, then dropped back into the bowl and disappeared. As far as I could tell it had a hiding place under the rim. The very location that Arch and Humpy had told me pythons were inclined to favour. Because I didn’t like frogs all that much and wasn’t certain that I would be able to sit down with one quite so close to me, I put it to Ros that it was her responsibility to remove it. She was Australian, the frog was Australian – and it seemed to me that they ought to have been able to work something out between them.

She contrived to catch it in the end, after several botched attempts which had the frog, and me, leaping in opposite directions, by flushing it into a polythene sandwich bag, which she then carried not a sufficient distance from the chalet to my mind, where she granted its occupant a freedom it probably went and squandered.

The incident was significant only in that it compromised the judgmatical temper which I’d been preparing for the Peace Expo. After you’ve been frightened by a small frog there isn’t a lot you can say about anything that is likely to sound just or wise, least of all on the subject of war and peace. So I kept my own counsel and adjourned for the night.

Saturday the 24th of May. Queen Victoria’s birthday. I knew this from Dr Ludwig Leichhardt’s Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington.

May 24th. It was the Queen’s birthday and we celebrated it with what – as our only remaining luxury – we were accustomed to call a fat cake, made of four pounds of flour and some suet, which we had saved for the express purpose, and with a pot of sugared tea.