He looks at the band behind him and says, “Hit it, boys!” The band launches into its own rendition of happy birthday.

Thus the whole scene is a wilderness of brightness, less radiant but more touching than when processions of men and maidens bearing urns and laurel-branches, crowned with ivy or with myrtle, paced along those sandstone roads, chanting paeans and prosodial hymns, toward the glistening porches and hypaethral cells.

Mail trains are limited to first and second class passengers, but on the mixed trains third class is also provided, and this is patronised exclusively by natives.

Meantime, he had met a divorced woman, born in the UK, but whose family had arrived as East Asian escapées from Uganda during the 1970s.