There is a German Graf von Herrenshausen, a large, yellow-bearded, blear-eyed monster, with a frogged coat and a huge pipe-stick projecting from the hindpocket, who kisses my hand whenever we meet, and leers at me from the whist-table – for, happily, he is past dancing — like a Ghoul in an Eastern tale.

I’m in a wraith with a thot, she gon’ give me some top, cause my music a bop, aye

Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.

My phone call was cut off before I could get the information.