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David had inherited his father’s lack of desire for displacement. A year after they had arrived, you could say with certainty that they would never leave, and that in three hundred years’ time, the tenth generation of Castelens would still be living quite contentedly in the town.

When David was 17, he worked out that it was time to sell what he called ‘Adventure Trips’. The first Adventure Trip that the East-West Travel Agency offered was to Lapland. There, the holidaymakers had to trudge for days from hut to hut while being bitten to death by mosquitoes and surviving on berries and whatever provisions they had brought with them.

At first, old Castelen couldn’t see the point. ‘You might as well start selling torture.’ But David maintained stubbornly that, on the contrary, people needed a portion of real misery. As long as they could see an end to it, and could come home again safely after a short while and tell heroic tales. Finally, his father agreed.

David wrote an advertisement for the local paper about the Adventure Trip to the Far North, in which he described ‘the bellowing of the elks’, ‘the fascinating Northern Lights’ and ‘the age-old customs and richly coloured splendour of the Lapps.’ The trip was booked up within six days. Castelen Senior found it irresistibly funny that his customers would soon simply bump into their neighbours instead of a bellowing elk.