Read Bluetooth status

[romeo987]

I am something of a software newb trying to work up a thing that uses conventional BT on ESP32. I would like to know whether the ESP is or is not connected to a client. There are numerous examples on the web for monitoring connection and disconnection events, and yes, I can write a bit of software to monitor these events and make an inference, but is there a simple, unambiguous status question that can be asked? In BluetoothSerial.cpp there is a function BluetoothSerial::connected() but the question

if (SerialBT.connected()){ ....

seems to always return TRUE - and I can't really find any useful description of that function.
I would appreciate any advice...
Roman