Larry Grayson drives a bus

A few years ago when still a member of the British Junior Chamber, we went on a twinning tour to Germany by coach. Our hosts put us up in their homes and a group of us found ourselves guests of one German member who ran a small hotel, and so the coach driver also lodged with us.

Our driver bore an uncanny resemblance to Larry Grayson, which had entertained me no end during the trip, and regaled us at dinner that night with some of his tales of overseas travel. However, he excelled himself when admitting he was something of a wine connoisseur.

“Actually, I’m quite partial to Blue Nun.”

Six people struggled heroically to stifle their laughter.

That said, I sometimes wonder if I have had a lucky escape from a similar gaffe. It was only after reading the novelisation of “Red Dwarf” (the early episodes of the TV series had clearly passed me by at this stage) that I first heard of Gazpacho soup. Obviously a public school education was wasted. I say public school, I was actually a direct grant pupil although the Direct Grant was to be scrapped by Shirley Williams (then Labour Education Secretary) for new entrants the following year.

Now Goaty Steve was a proper public schoolboy, never mind that his school had been a Direct Grant school until just a few years before he joined. And being good, traditional all boys schools we both studied Latin, me mercifully for only the first 2 years, and discovered that we both followed the same syllabus which was based around a character called Caecillius, a Roman citizen living in Pompei at the time of Vesuvius’s eruption. Steve was convinced his Latin master was relating his story from personal experience.

Anyway, I digress. I still get a cold chill down my spine thinking that I too could have made a Rimmer-esque faux pas and declared that this soup was “a bit cold”. Still, it’s not as embarrassing as my elder sister asking at school, “so who is Pearl Harbor?”

Tch, as everyone knows she's a friend of Camp David.