It's just past sunset and the strip at South Beach, Miami, is pumping. It is the biggest weekend of the year in America's glitziest city. The Art Basel is on, an annual fine art festival that has been overwhelmed by the world's thrillingly wealthy – and the Hollywood stars they like to play with – dropping a few million on trinkets.
The sorts of media that follow these events are beside themselves.
Somewhere in this town, New York Magazine was later to report, Leonardo DiCaprio left a nightclub this weekend in early December with "nearly two dozen women".
What was not so widely reported was that South Beach stank of ****. There is no nice way to put it. The place smelled of human waste. There had been a brief, heavy downpour but the water could not escape, so the sewers backed up and filled the roads. The traffic slowed to walking pace or seized entirely, and the models tottering between the restaurants and hotels and clubs had to pick wide arcs on the pavements to avoid the nasty pools swelling from the gutters.
Only the people seemed to take it in their stride, perhaps because this sort of thing is no longer unusual in and around Miami.
A couple of days later I stood on a sealed road in a park in the southern suburbs of Miami – again ankle deep in water – with Harold Wanless, chairman and professor at the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami, to discuss why the place was so wet. The answer was not complicated. "The ocean has risen," he says with laugh. "It is what it is."
