A half hour’s refreshing dip in the sea had left his skin so macerated and puckered, at once puffy and wrinkled, and now so freckled with oily pollutants, that he looked like nothing so much as a sweltering, misshapen mass of flyblown lard as he slumped back onto the burning sand, still irked that his daughter had branded him an unprincipled weathercock (or was it a ’two-faced slimeball’?) for contriving a week’s free tarriance on the heliolatrous Côte d’Azur as the condition of his giving a keynote speech on the inexorability of global warming.