He blushed, and stammered a few words of apology.

All is fresh, clean, and clear to the jaded traveller, emerging like an incipient culm-pile in his becindered state from the eight hours of soft-coal inhalation which constitutes his chief impression of the trip up from New York.

He raised his glass. ‘Here's to you, Oom Ben,’ he said. ‘Give them hell.’

Beta oxidation involves a repeating sequence of four enzymatic steps in which an acyl-coenzyme A ester (acyl-CoA) undergoes subsequent steps of dehydrogenation, hydration, another dehydrogenation and finally thiolytic cleavage [27 ].