My neighbour tagged along.

“Jolly good read,” he said of Kim: “amazing book. Chap who wrote it must have been there. Really knows the place.”

“You’ve been to India yourself?”

“Of course. There as a kid. Grew up there. And in Burma. Then South Africa and Rhodesia. Not a bad place, Rhodesia.”

Once again I felt that deep sense of awe I always experience when I come up against the British Empire. These people nip over to Burma the way we do to Eger. Only, they’re less curious about it. They know that wherever they go in the world they will be among exactly the same sort of people as themselves.

“Actually, my old man was a major in an Irish regiment,” he continued. “Stationed all over the place. That’s why I missed out a bit on my education. Things to do with books and so forth. But it’s also why I did so well in the tropics.”

“You were a soldier too?”

“No. I never quite made it into the army. I have this bad habit of failing exams. Some of them I must have had five goes at … But I never got lucky. But forget about that. What’s done is done. We Irish live for the future. I didn’t become a soldier; not everyone can be a soldier. I just loafed around wherever I wanted in the Empire. Not a bad place to be. Have you heard of the East African Uwinda expedition?”

“Yes, as I recall … ” I said, scrambling to salvage my self-respect.

“I was in it. We were over nine thousand feet up. Fantastic climbing. There was one mountain, I tell you, with sides like glass. You moved up three feet and slid back five. We slithered around for two whole days and got nowhere.