See the white sleeveless top I’m wearing? Friend Averil – she who has first-hand knowledge of my incompetence around horses – has expressed a certain weariness at seeing me repeatedly clad in it throughout my sub-continental sojourn.

But I will not speak ill of this humble garment, though it be unfashionable and of great antiquity. Its origins are lost in the mists of time and I cannot now remember how many shekels I paid for it. Not many, I think.

But it hath served me well over many a gallivant in hot climes. For it creaseth not, neither doth it attract and hold dirt. After I have trampled it clean in some foreign shower or washed it with hotel shampoo in some faraway basin, it drippeth dry readily, yea, even before the night is over and the dawn is come.

Moreover, it hath armholes small enough to disguise the upper body flab of its wearer, and a neckline low enough not to scandalise the dusky denizens of sterner cultures than mine own. And it goeth with anything.

Many a time and oft when I am seized by the urge to declutter my wardrobe my eye hath fallen on this by now slightly begrimed chemise from which threads are at last beginning to pull free, alas, and I remember the service it hath rendered me, and I am glad of it, and it is spared being cast into the pit of Vinnie’s.

Here endeth the lesson.