At the age of fifteen I went to work at a garage in Orpington where the proprietor was a singularly stupid man called Bert Ditcher. In his capacity as storeman he used to wear a khaki knee-length coat. One day he needed to order a new one so he went around to all the employees asking “How do you spell ‘khaki’?” He received a variety of deliberately confusing replies: carkey; karcey; kakhi; kaakee and so forth. Realising that he would get no help from this collection of wags he mooched out of the door moaning to himself, “these buggers are not going to help me – I know what I’ll do. I’ll order beige ones, that’s bloody easy … B.A.G.E.!” We didn’t enlighten him.