I cruise the streets aimlessly, eventually driving south out of town. A few miles later, I slow the truck down at the sight of an upside-down brown Cadillac and the whirring lights of an ambulance in front of it. A couple of Indians are being administered to by the edge of the road, surrounded by broken beer bottles. One is lying on his side as though fast asleep, the other is having a comical slow-motion fight with a medic who is trying to clamp an oxygen mask to his face. Gingerly, I steer the truck round them then, on a whim, transfer its bulky weight to a random dirt track leading into the hills. The rocks here are the colour of clay and look as though they’ve had their clammy surfaces scored by Emmy’s fork before being baked hard by the sun. The track narrows further and just when I’m thinking it would be better to turn around than risk a quadruple puncture, it splits at a signpost for Wildcat Canyon and I stop the truck, remembering something.

The menu of the M&M is designed as a newspaper, its front page printed with dishes on offer and its inside section a mixture of articles, ads, and one cracking good story with the headline: ‘Tucson Finds Hobbit Living in a Warren of Caves’, which I had torn off to show the children. Now I pull the crumpled piece of paper out of my pocket and there it is, a tiny ad on the reverse side of the article for ‘Wildcat Haircutting’. Out of mild curiosity, I drive on until the track dwindles to a dead end and a splintered B&B sign.

I can’t see a Bed and Breakfast anywhere, but like a pig after truffles, I follow an overwhelming smell of frying food, eventually dropping down into a small clearing with two low bungalows and a wooden cabin. The bungalows are identical with four doors apiece and metal numbers nailed to them. There’s a definite air of Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the whole place and if someone were to casually mention that the letters spelling out BAR above the door of the cabin had been daubed in blood, you wouldn’t be in the least surprised.