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The Bed & Breakfast I had just had one of those perfect Caribbean days. In the morning, I’d explored the rough back-country tracks of St Kitts on a quad bike, crisscrossing fields of sugar cane, coconut plantations and thickets of creeper-draped forest, stopping off at Lambert’s, a hugely evocative ruined sugar mill on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

Then I’d sat down to an excellent, locally sourced lunch — at the Spice Mill, on Cockle-shell Beach, on the soon-to-be-developed southern peninsula of the island — followed by my first swim of the trip in the warm, shallow sea. Afterwards, with the mountains of verdant Nevis seemingly close enough to touch, and a signature Lion rum punch from the eponymous beach shack in hand, I had listened to a storming, funk-inflected set by a band from Martinique.