But the moral was not lost, even on cocky young buckos like ourselves. It could just as well have been a story about George Bush himself. I have no difficulty imagining him down on all fours in a hospital room, mopping up a spill to spare the nurses the trouble. For a multi-armed, omniscient, omnipotent deity, the Vishnu was the kindest, most decent man I’ve ever known.

​And the most reticent when it came to self-advertisement. He recoiled from chest thumping, or talking about the ‘Introspection Thing,’ as he called it. This was, after all, a man who’d had had his knuckles rapped by his mum at the Thanksgiving dinner table in 1980.

​Mr Bush had been regaling the family with his adventures on the presidential campaign trail. Surely a more interesting as a topic than, say, Cousin Bob’s landing a six-pound brown trout. But Dorothy Bush was having none of it. She interrupted him in mid-story and said, ‘George, stop it. You’re talking about yourself too much.’ The future leader of the free world obediently stopped.