Easter Fun And Frolics

Recalling the other day my odd-one-out quiz from November 2009, I'm inspired to set another one — all in the spirit of holiday fun! I do hope you will participate. All you have to do is read these twenty-one facts about my life and decide which three (and only three) are false. The other eighteen are absolutely true, I assure you. It's easy! Isn't it?

1. I once had lunch with Cilla Black.

The Georgian State Dance Company

2. I have seen Bob Dylan more than thirty times.

3. I once danced with the Georgian State Dance Company on the stage of Northampton's Derngate Theatre to the great embarrassment of my children, who almost crawled under their seats.

4. Once when out walking the Cornish coastal path, I passed Jenny Agutter coming in the opposite direction.

5. I once stood within six feet of Lauren Bacall.

6. I have a phobic fear of beetroot — I can barely look at the stuff, let alone touch or eat it.

7. Jason Donovan once posed for a photograph in front of my wife — but she was so nervous she couldn't get the camera to work.

The flimsiest of nightclothes

8. I once woke up on a street bench in Frankfurt under the disapproving gaze of German bankers on their way to work.

9. On another occasion, I woke up in a hotel bed in Pau and found two strangers lying next to me in the flimsiest of nightclothes — a German banker and his wife, as it happens.

10. In a fit of sexual jealousy I once smashed the window of a Parisian chambre de bonne with my bare fists.

11. Once upon a time my hair extended down beyond my shoulders, and I was so thin I could almost touch my backbone with my stomach.

12. I once drank wine with George Melly, Maureen Lipman and Anne Diamond in the same room.

13. I was once asked by Kenneth Williams why I wore a beard (I had a beard in my twenties) as it made me look so much older. He then confided that he fancied a good-looking Gibraltarian colleague of mine (clean-shaven, of course).

14. My middle name is Archibald.

A glass of urine

15. I once drank a pint of urine in the mistaken belief that it was water.

16. My birth name is Roberta, but I renamed myself Robert after a sex change operation in 1982.

17. In a posh restaurant in Rome I once stubbed out a cigarette in a bowl of freshly prepared tagliatelle alla panna to an audience of utterly bemused and rightly insulted Italian waiters.

18. In one of Manchester's top Chinese restaurants I once bit into a dim sum rather too eagerly. Its contents arced gracefully over the table, and came to rest all over the shirt and tie of my sales director host sitting opposite.

An American alligator

19. My wife's first cousin is the famous comedian and TV personality Rowland Rivron.

20. My sister-in-law's ex-boyfriend built Paul McCartney's house in Kent.

21. My wife was once nearly eaten by an alligator in Florida's Everglades National Park.

Here's wishing everyone a Happy Easter!