Poshish
My dad gets xmas cards from Mary Robinson (President of Ireland) and generally gets an invite to Hillborough Castle whenever the Viceroy has a beano. I did Latin A-level and have beaten Salman Rushdie and Francis Wheen at a table quiz, which probably qualifies me.

Hard to beat my old editor Paul Sieveking, though - he has about a dozen middle names, all of them odd (Amadé de Giberne is all I can remember), and portraits in his flat of family members going back to the 1600s. The marble busts in his living room which I used to assume he'd picked up in junk shops are, in fact, also of family members. And you know those Napoleonic war-era Martello towers all around the British and Irish coasts? His great-great-great something grandad's idea.

And he has HG Wells' old opera hat in a padded envelope in his study.
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Thu 15 Sep 2005, 16:11, Reply)