Boxing Day and the Melbourne heat is fierce. Australia is walloping England in the Test Cricket, David Gower is dismissed for an elegant thirty, and at six-thirty it’s time to drive home to Annette and the kids.

Six-thirty and the sun still blazing. Hand-blistering steering wheel, thigh-burning upholstery, Lygon Street a heat-desert. But no, not quite deserted: two young women wearing sun frocks exuent from a ‘phone booth. They wander along Lygon Street towards the coffee precinct.

Abruptly the young ladies change pace and direction. Their gait too. Now they dance towards the car parked at the kerb. It is at this point that their mode of dress becomes relevant: the sun frocks I referred to are strapless affairs, strategically elasticized at their top. As the young ladies close on the car their hands rise in concert to the upper rim of their garments. Four hands grasp elastic, four hands pull briskly down, four breasts tumble or flow or erupt – an unprepared witness cannot readily capture the apt verb – as the ladies now alter their gait further with a swinging of the shoulders in three dimensions, now higher, now lower, now right, now left, now forward, now backward, in highly harmonic motion. The choreography dazzles an unprepared witness, a male, a married male, driving homeward on a blazing evening.

The unprepared male drives on in the direction opposite that of the young exhibitors, his gaze set on the empty roadway ahead. Some impulse prompts a final backward glance. The male now notices there are two men seated in the parked car towards which the exhibitors brought seasonal offerings.

This unexpected sequence of events leaves me pondering: why? What prompted the display? Then it comes to me, the ugliest compliment in the Australian vernacular. Show us your tits, the young men must have shouted. And it being Boxing Day and the blood alcohol level still high, and the season of goodwill upon us, the ladies obliged.

And a final glimpse confirms the earlier one; yes, those breasts, nulliparous beyond doubt, are indeed round and full and generous.E