One of mine is the late Bamber Gascoigne, the first and best host of University Challenge. Perhaps his reputation is enhanced in my mind because of my increasing frustration with Paxman’s supercillious attitude (yes I know he has Parkinson’s but he should have been replaced sooner) and the uninspiring prospect of the next one, Amal Rajan, the man who speaks so rapidly that all his words seem to morph into giant Germanic sentences.
Anyway, I stole this from my latest copy of The Oldie and thought I would share. By the way, I don’t remember one fast road in Afghanistan, but two, each built by the Russians and the Americans, but still…
Do you lie on the beach?
No, I get terribly sunburnt. I was ginger-haired as a young thing. When I was in the army, a group of us young officers spent a naughty weekend in Hamburg and saw the naked ladies and – at three in the morning, we were thrown out of all the clubs and decided we couldn’t afford to spend only four hours in a hotel. So we slept on the beach. We were all very drunk; so we just lay down on the beach. We didn’t wake up till 12 – God, we were burnt and we had to go on parade the next morning. I’ve never lain on a beach since.
Biggest terror?
In Afghanistan once, there was a very fast road, half-built by the Americans and the Russians.
We saw a family sitting near the edge of the road. Christina slowed down while the family got safely down a bank but, as she accelerated, the youngest child decided to run back over the road. She jammed on the breaks but he was bumped by the front of the car.
We stopped the car and a very sweet father was there. We looked at the child who seemed perfectly alright. He said, ‘Everything seems OK; don’t worry.’
I said, ‘We must give you some money,’ and offered him the equivalent of about ten quid.
They waved us goodbye and, as we were driving off, a different, furious-looking man, holding an enormous piece of stone, stood in front of the car, shouting ‘Money, money.’ He came round to the open window and, to my absolute astonishment, Christina offered him the same note we’d offered to the good man.
As he reached out to take it, our car roared away – she’d been in gear while holding a note in one hand. As we went, I looked in the mirror and saw this enormous stone gaining on us…
