The river is high. He loves these few hours when the weary old Thames looks grand and imposing, the water lapping at the huge granite blocks of the Embankment and the bridges, the tourist boats, the restaurant boats and HMS Belfast all riding high in the water, and today the spring sun is titivating the water and turning the familiar murky khaki into something lively and active. As he slows for a traffic light, he sees small dinghies sailing, anxiously escorted by a man zipping about in a Zodiac inflatable. All the sailors wear fluorescent life jackets. Julian has a friend who lives on the river at Limehouse and he claims to swim when the tide is full; the detritus, the dead bodies – traditional in Limehouse – have sunk and the mysterious stray chunks of lumber have come to rest, so that the water, he says, is perfectly clean. He says he has seen a man catch a salmon near by. When Moses Tubal was alive the river ran between fields and swamps and groves of willow and drifts of celandine. The sweet Thames ran softly then. And in his subdued state, Julian wonders if all the massive works and cranes and bridges are really a tribute to man’s energy and vision. Could they just be one huge delusion? At least the Victorians were making something, something that existed and that you could stumble over, something very different in fact from the Gaussian bell curve.

He shouts, ‘Where are our fucking alligator swamps? Où sont les crocodiles d’antan? Where the fuck are they?’ And he laughs.

As he passes the stretch of green at Cheyne Walk, presided over by a statue of Sir Thomas More, he sees a man in a tweed jacket practising his fly fishing on the grass, his lurcher sitting watching patiently. The gillies in Scotland taught Julian and Simon to cast on grass with a button in place of a fly. What is it about the English upper classes that it is still so important to associate themselves with the countryside? Lurchers, rabbits, tweed, Viyella shirts, caps – flat caps are back – and those Dijon mustard trousers. Signifiers. Signifying that these people are the true people of England. You never see a Jew in these togs, accompanied by a lurcher, although that Home Secretary chap used to dress up in new green wellingtons and corduroy trousers in his constituency. God, he looked like a twat. At Eton the thickos with inherited acres regarded themselves as far superior to the merely rich or intelligent.