Back home in Düsseldorf, he has an intelligent, stylish girlfriend, the same age as he is. He is gregarious, with a small but close group of friends. He drinks wheat beer and eats Ritter Sport chocolate with them, and they laugh about people wearing funny hats, and make funny remarks about the innocuous bonds that their wives hold them in. But then he flies over the rump of East Anglia – in his mind already formed as the rubicon of his sub-conscious - and infidelity is one of the many delights he counts on. But you’ve got to wait for the best.

He becomes a thin, lonely, elegant figure, making no effort to dress like the English. He trusts in his brown leather shoes and corduroy trousers. He trusts in his robust, but not unaccented skill with the language, and more than anything he trusts in his own sheer enthusiasm in the English people, what he understands as the English national character, convinced that the charm of this will win over the kind of proletarians he would detest back home. So he sets off through the night with the self-confidence that comes with unshackling yourself from all that you are sure of, and he cascades into the pubs, drinking alone at first, merely inhaling the musty mixture of Golden Wonder and Benson and Hedges. He’ll get drunk slowly and evenly, keeping track more consciously than he would in Germany, careful to savour his John Smith’s.

But the real goal is still ahead. Then he sees her.