Almost everybody has met someone with a good story about someone well known that they had met - the 'I danced with a man, who danced with a girl, who danced with the Prince of Wales' phenomenon. Here is one just received about Beatle Ringo Starr.The mention of Barbara Bach dates it in the early 1980s.

I got a minicab from Hammersmith to Heathrow and was chatting with the driver about Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists which he had read several times (I think I had a copy with me that I was going to read on the flight). As with so many other readers the book had radicalised him. He told me that he never called passengers 'Sir'. On that subject he mentioned that he had once driven Ringo Starr who told him he was the only driver he had ever had who did not call him 'Sir.'

Intrigued, I inquired about the great (and irascible) Fab Four drummer*. He had driven Ringo and Barbara Bach from London to a studio in Manchester. Ringo spent most of the journey rolling and smoking joints. At the end of the journey he gave my minicab driver a £100 tip, which he said was still the best tip that he had ever received...and he never called him 'Sir'!

*Of whom John Lennon said  when asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the world --"He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles..."