Back in the early sixties, when I was manager of a wallpaper shop in the Corridor in Bath, if the finances would stretch to it I would sometimes have lunch at the nearby Joe Lyons Corner Shop.

I’d always order the cheapest thing on the menu – bangers and mash. A chap I’d never seen before sitting opposite me on the tiny table had the same. On this occasion, the sausages were exceptionally well done and when I went to cut one, it shot off the plate and rolled gently across the table and lodged under the rim of the other bloke’s plate.

As he was engrossed in his Bath Chronicle, he didn’t notice so I reached out to retrieve my sausage.

Just then he lowered his paper to see a sausage speared on my fork just inches from his plate. It must have looked for all the world as if I’d pinched one of his.

He looked at me, then very ostentatiously counted his sausages, then returned to his newspaper and carried on eating.

Being a rather gauche young man and ravenously hungry, the absurdity of the sitatuation was lost on me at the time, but I still smile when I think of it all these years later.

Robert Hayter, Chantry Court, Devizes.