At 7:55 pm, 17 year-old Mariuccia Monteverdi, clad in nothing but skin-tight black neoprene hot pants bearing the legend PLEASE REMOVE BEFORE USE stamped across her arse, threw caution to the wind and extracted the first After Eight from its slender brown envelope, crumpled the wrapper into a dense little ball and then lobbed it with insouciant accuracy into a Murano glass ashtray (we have all experienced these serendipitous moments when eye, hand and mind coincide to banish the gremlins of error and dispatch the arrow, cool as a cucumber, straight to the heart of the astonished bull’s-eye) sitting on top of a squat rectangular coffee-table whose Formica top was printed—black on white—with the following words of the designer Charles Parmentier’s poem Qualities: ‘the coyly palindromic, the kinkily faded, the nervously parched, the sympathetically crippled, the hypothetically arch, the haphazardly burnished, the preposterously svelte, the usefully dysfunctional, the artistically sullen, the heavily dappled, the sanguinely embittered, the salubriously vague, the devilishly emblematic, the transparently brown, the famously obese, the raucously stiff, the presumptuously megalithic, the meekly telescopic, the frenetically safe, the luxuriously sulfurous, the moistly trilingual, the valuably automatic, the passably postglacial, the traumatically obscure, the gluttonously sassy, the tryingly lubricious, the hideously apt, the charmingly aquatic, the vibrantly injured, the wordlessly fallow, the ceaselessly creased, the tenuously umlauted, the viciously blue, the hopefully bandaged, the wishfully comatose, the honorably senile, the icily indicative, the fetchingly square, the mutely divided, the dreadfully spry, the mindlessly cosy, the wistfully sandy, the opulently sticky, the openly arithmetical, the mechanically intimate, the feebly hypnotic, the dopily striped, the winningly vapid, the superbly salty, the facetiously wet, the badly pampered, the densely lewd, the profitably zonked, the anxiously clad, the coldly remunerative, the nicely tumescent, the rapidly belligerent, the mortally outstretched, the cynically laundered, the woefully khaki, the eternally twee, the daringly fluffy, the incorrectly torpid, the shamefully elastic, the drastically gaunt, the ritually subatomic, the congenitally sloppy, the nonchalantly ill, the marginally fuzzy, the debatably fey, the adroitly myopic, the masterfully churly, the successfully slinky, the supposedly tawny, the oddly kinetic, the imperially sad, the absolutely panhuman, the dolefully lax, the wastefully stingy, the arrestingly flounced, the repetitiously obtuse, the adverbially fecund, the charismatically ordinary, the hurtfully pagan, the strikingly plump, the typographically minute, the achingly metallic, the lexicographically inexhaustible, the genuinely dank, the visibly bruised, the angelically horny, the exasperatingly posh, the rewardingly furry, the richly bespectacled, the hyperbolically buxom, the virtually orgasmic, the neverendingly dubious, the tenuously erect, the awkwardly tepid, the variably mournful, the imperiously bluff, the classically putrid, the safely spasmodic, the cryptically sexy, the shamelessly vulpine, the regionally rhythmic, the traditionally absent, the sluttishly becoming, the haughtily elegiac, the syntactically chaotic, the inadequately woeful, the verbally arid, the attractively stunted, the tearfully tetchy, the unwaveringly irreverent, the tauntingly facile, the simply serendipitous, the arguably nepotistic, the victoriously stamped.’