At the crematorium for the happily offbeat funeral of a Liverpool supporting acquaintance, whose ashes are to be scattered at Anfield, I had listened contentedly to Hey Jude, Let it be, Imagine, and We’ll never walk Alone, crashing out of the disco sized speakers; and I was just settling down to absorb the nugget strewn ‘readings’ from various family members when I was horrified to hear, during a particularly quiet, pensive moment, the tinny sound of the William Tell overture ringing out from some idiot’s mobile phone.

Mortified to realise the noise was coming from somewhere within the folds of the heavy, sombre coat I was wearing to cover up the fact that my best and only suit trousers had been eaten by moths, it took me long, agonising moments of perspiration inducing self-loathing to extract the offending article from a squashed inner pocket and stab the switch off buttons.

In a Larry David nightmare I would of course have answered the phone in a loud voice and said that although I was at a funeral I was all ears and couldn’t wait to hear whatever the caller wanted to tell me. As it was, I had to shut my eyes for the next five minutes and simply pretend I was somewhere else.

Although this was a moment of sheer horror, as somebody said afterwards, the man in the coffin would have loved it!