One Saturday morning, many years ago, I was lying in bed with my then-girlfriend – a fairly heavy-set girl. I had been out to grab a paper, and had then climbed back into bed.

We read the various sections of the paper; she had the magazine. One of the regular articles was a kind of questionnaire thing, where a different well-known person answered the same, fixed set of questions each week, e.g. ‘When were you happiest?’, ‘What is your favourite place?’, etc.

One question was ‘what single thing would improve your appearance?’. My girlfriend turned to me and asked ‘What single thing would improve my appearance?’

I answered ‘Liposuction’, giggled, and then instantly realised what a tremendous screw-up I had made. How would I back-pedal out of this one? This was going to be bad…

But then it got worse. She asked ‘What’s liposuction?’.

Yes – I had to explain to her what it was.

She wasn’t impressed. Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t my girlfriend for much longer after that.