A mile or two before we got to the meet he stopped at an inn, where he put our horses into the stable for twenty minutes, ‘to give them a chance to stale’.

Before coming on this trip I decided to brush up on my Italian, so I learnt one phrase: Voglio andare veloce, which translates into I want to go fast. I test it out on Matteo, undoubtedly butchering it with my Australian accent. He throws his head back and laughs a deep, booming, operatic laugh. For a moment, I think my friend who taught me the phrase has stitched me up and I’ve just said something very crass.

A retarded sense of meta is achieved whenever Leto’s Chapman goes on about the phony theatrics of film actors, but it’s Lindsay Lohan, as über–Lennon fan Jude, who breaks your heart, looking convincingly horrified that she has three undeserved Razzies while Leto has none.

Glass bottles of liquid LSD; moist blocks of Manali charras and Malana cream; sachets of smack; a hundred caps of MDMA and a phial of Australian DMT; ampoules of medical morphine and a dense pad of four thousand Californian blotters.