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He still lived above the shop, and the Adventure Trips were his best-selling line. He had profited from growing prosperity and boredom. One of his most successful trips was a two-week trek through Suriname, with overnight accommodation in bushmen’s huts and including a day’s piranha fishing. He also dropped people off in the Alaskan wilderness. Oddly enough, the demand for that trip had increased after one of his customers had only just survived an attack by a grizzly bear.

‘People are getting more and more demanding,’ he said. ‘It’s no longer enough to give them a walk through a desert full of scorpions or a survival trail through the jungle with rickety hanging bridges over crocodile-infested rivers. These days, they find that on the dreary side. Hang-gliding at the North Pole, a voyage to the Canaries in a leaky WWII German submarine, that’s the kind of thing you’ve got to come up with. There was someone here the other day who had read Moby Dick. Wanted to go whale hunting, expense no object. So I follow it up, and three weeks ago the guy flew to Japan and is now on one of those ships. He said he was going to bring me back a piece of whale meat.’