Another flight. I moved myself into suburban Adelaide for a couple of weeks, watching the lorikeets feed outside the windows and waiting for a koala to cross the garden. Alan and Jan live a life of what I might call suburban hedonism, where ‘moderation’ is forbidden and philistinism revered. I was delighted to see they are continuing my grandmother’s chocolate drawer.

I didn’t see very much of the city centre; it’s the dead season in the “Festival State”, so yet another place I’ll have to come back to. But I did visit some of the museums and galleries, including the Museum of Economic Botany, a very old fashioned dark room full of cabinets displaying ancient specimens of plants with explanations of how they are used by aborigininals and trade. I also spent a long time looking at Pacific cultures, and was transfixed by a very strange video of a man hunting sharks, in which the spirits of his ancestors live, with magic, a harpoon and his bare hands.

Afterwards, walking along North Terrace I was stopped by a man from a bush conservation charity: “Is that a Yorkshire accent? Where are you from?” “London.” “Oh, I thought so.”

As I passed the Grand Lodge of South Australia I saw a sign announcing free guided tours every Thursday afternoon at 2 pm. It just so happened to be 2 pm on Thursday, so I went in and met the 84 year-old Freemason guide; it was just the two of us in the end. We began in the basement looking at the parquet floor in rooms smelling of orange squash and soft biscuits and then worked our way up into the main rooms. He showed me the hierarchy of dusty aprons and lit up the red star on the floor and the letter ‘G’ hanging from the ceiling (“it stands for geometry, not God”), and then let me sit in the Master’s chair and bang the hammer! When he joined in his twenties there were 26,000 Freemasons in South Australia; now there are 2,400. They must be really desperate for new members.

I wanted to know what they actually do in their meetings. “Well, there’s the usual business of meetings, you know, the minutes of the last meeting, accounts, and then there’s a lot of ceremony”. So they don’t really do anything, as far as I can tell. When I asked about the loving cup, he started talking about his recent trip to London and how he had hobnobbed with the grandchildren of the Russian Tsars. We went back downstairs and he handed me a leaflet on joining the Order of the Eastern Star; the leaflet had photos of middle aged women in long white skirts talking to other middle aged women in long white skirts. It was all rather sad.

We went on weekend drives beyond Adelaide, along long straight roads lined with gum trees. Every time we stopped so I could jump out to take a photo, I was hit by the smell of eucalyptus. At points there were whole sections of woodland where the trunks were charred black from bushfires.”Koala!” Jan suddenly shouted as we hurtled along. And there it was, hugging a tree, sharp claws and fluffy fur, staring down at us.

We drove through glorious rolling hills covered in vineyards and wineries producing some of the best wine in the world. We tasted tawny port, Chardonnay, Shiraz, Riesling, pretending to detect overtones of orange blossom and lines of acidity between the notes of Christmas pudding and prune. As we passed through the Barossa and Clare valleys, Alan and Jan told me stories of their time hot air ballooning, pointing out landing spots, complaining about the stresses of weather and wind changes, and giggling about the proposals Alan has prodded men through. Going south to the Murray River and beyond, we made a half-hearted attempt to go whale watching, but our failure was irrelevant in the evening sunlight glowing on the rocks and the turquoise water.

The Australian election was rather less exciting than the Brexit drama, but at least it moved at a pace you could keep up with. I queued up to vote and met the leader of the Green Party in South Australia (I think). A famous man I’m told. The current in-party is the Nick Xenephon Team, formed around an independent MP; it seems pretty decent and sensible, but every time I see a poster with his face on, it just seems like a bizarre anti-gambling personality cult.

Alan and Jan have been so generous. It is the debt of one generation to the next. On my last morning, as the wind lashed about, we ate toasted crumpets with caviar and chocolate milk, and went for a walk on the beach. An idyllic farewell to the mainland.