A couple of years ago I was spending Christmas at a girlfriend’s parent’s house for the first time. This is undoubtedly a Big Thing. Several days in the company of people I don’t know all that well where there’s going to be a buzzing atmosphere of festive spirit and an expectation of merry joy.

We were playing a Scrabble-like game and with my first batch of tiles I managed to make JEW horizontally and then vertically, utilising the E, I spelled out the word DEVIL. “It’s funny,” I said, “because it’s in the shape of a cross.”

Later the same evening, my girlfriend’s father had put a CD of 70s hits on. I was bobbing my head along nonchalantly when he asked me if I knew the song.

“Is it Jonathan King?” I ventured. It was. The next track came on.

“How about this one?”

“No,” I said, “I can only recognise the music of convicted pedophiles.”

My girlfriend’s older brother shot me an incredulous look. “You do realise you’re supposed to be making a good impression?”

However hard I try to suppress the urge, sometimes I just purposely say the wrong thing to the wrong person. I thought it was unique to me, but over the weekend I discovered that perhaps there’s a genetic link on which I can place the blame.

I was sitting in a pub in Charing Cross with my parents who’d come down to London to watch a theatre show. It’s my birthday soon, so my mother was asking me about my list of things I’d quite like to do before I die. We began discussing my consumption of various uncommon meats.

“Have you eaten zebra?” my mum asked.

“Nope,” I replied.

“How about a giraffe then?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No, not giraffe.”

She paused for a second. “Well have you tried beaver?”