It’s often seemed to me that in matters of love and courtship there is a curious arithmetic whereby the more beautiful the girl that you fall in love with, the more . . . peculiar her parents turn out to be. My good friend Reginald Sedgwick married a very beautiful woman and a curious mother-in-law. For the forty-or-so years that she’s been using it, Mrs Wilcox (for such is her name) has never yet got a grip on the English Language. So, talking about a wayward nephew, she will say: “He’s only going through a phrase”. Or there again, boasting about her husband’s fine record as a twenty-year motorist with no accident yet to his name, she will say: “He’s still got it, you know – his no bones claimus”. Sympathising with the Jews at Easter time she says: “They’ve still got the feast of the flyover”.

 The crunch came for Reginald when he took his beautiful wife round to the in-laws, some time ago, for a Sunday tea - you know: pilchards and trifle. Towards the end of the meal, Mrs Wilcox picked up a little glass salt cellar which she believes to be crystal and, holding it up to the light, said: “If you look through there, Reggie, you’ll see all the colours of the rectum”.

Here is a song for such as Reginald Sedgwick who marry more than they bargained for.