What he came up with was a two-day personalized safari for a cost commensurate with the principle of personalization. He arrived at this by measuring a map with a ruler and tapping figures into a computer. You would never have guessed, walking bent through the dusty streets of Derby, that they contained such a striking example of twentieth-century office technology. Machines hummed in the background. Phones dialled themselves. Other phones spoke the moment they were spoken to. At one time Neil had three long-distance conversations going while his hands were free to do calculations on a jotter.

Sitting opposite him, in the client’s seat, I felt like a man waiting for a mortgage.

Once we’d agreed on a tentative price – it had to be tentative, since there could be no certitude about the roads and therefore about the mileage – Neil proposed that we go out to dinner that night with him and his ‘partner’. Actually lifting a phone this time, he rang his ‘partner’ to check availability, and from his tone of quiet but fretful authority we were able to deduce, correctly, that his ‘partner’ was female, his girlfriend, and discontented. The machine has yet to be invented that can erase the crackle of domestic stress from a line of communication.

Back at our hotel an amazing change had taken place. Where we had previously been treated with morose indifferentism (not so much rudeness as a sort of regulation Derby discourtesy – wholly impersonal), we were now showered with smiles and solicitations. Our rooms had been cleaned twice. The cost of our accommodation had plummeted.

There could be only one explanation. Although it was a matter of principle with me not to talk about myself as a writer, even less a travel writer, the fact had cropped up in conversation with Neil. It was he, then, who must have flashed a message along the wires, even as we sat with him, to the effect that Derby was under scrutiny. Hereafter the town was on its best behaviour whenever it saw us.

But it was too late. The die had been cast.

Dinner with Neil and his partner, Robin, was a trying experience for all four of us, not so much because they were going through what might best be called a sticky patch in their relationship, but because Robin wanted us to know, and wanted us to know that she knew that we knew, that that was what they were going through. She averted her eyes whenever Neil spoke. She shuttered them whenever Neil spoke to her. ‘I have a suicidal tendency,’ Neil said, suicidally, ‘to say the very things that Robin hates to hear.’

‘Such as that,’ Robin said, somehow managing to pinch her nostrils from the inside, in the way that other people can suck in their cheeks.

‘See what I mean?’ Neil said.