El-Salahi, by the way, seems to have been devoid of such bizarre notions of competition. He strikes me from this remove as a very serious fellow—I suppose what I am saying is that he was not obviously disposed to be an idiot. I don’t imagine that in reality I ever featured in his thoughts, beyond perhaps a brief flicker of curiosity about where a good Ethiopian boy would get such an obsession with flying saucers, or with the neon colours of a corporate-industrial city at night. I will tell you honestly, also, that even in that imagined competition where we were honourable equals contesting for the joy of it and for the applause of the crowd, he won. He had a sense of self rooted in his craft and his religion and no doubt a dozen other things I hadn’t got to grips with, while I, meanwhile, had determined that I was a citizen of the world, for which I blame Humphrey Bogart. When I saw Casablanca for the first time, in a street near my home, the images projected from the back of a truck on to a great sheet of bedlinen stitched and bleached for the occasion, it had a powerful effect upon me, and from then on I took the line that drinking whisky and wearing a white tuxedo made me part of the global brotherhood of rebel males.