There are five of us. Ted, Ivan, Ronnie, Norman and me, George. We meet up every year or so somewhere in London close to the river and the main south west train line out of Waterloo. That’s convenient for me and Ron in particular but the others trek in from The New Forest, Cheshire and Stockholm respectively. We all attended the same grammar school, speak with refined Lancashire accents and have enjoyed careers in remarkably different walks of life. More of that another time, however, as I have the first story of shame and embarrassment to tell. It belongs to Norman.

More often than not we hold our reunion at a parkland hotel near Twickenham. It is quite posh and attracts many overseas international rugby teams who need a training camp prior to playing England at the national stadium. I made the reservation for lunch and emailed copies of the a la carte menu in advance to my friends. We must have been sipping a second round of gin and tonics in the bar when a waiter wearing the name tag Luigi on his lapel suddenly approached us in a state of agitation. “I’m mortified to tell you that we have had a problem in the kitchen,” he stammered in stilted English. “Some of the items on the menu are not available. I am so embarrassed to inform you. Nothing like this has happened before, sirs.”

“What exactly is the problem?” asked Ted, taking charge with his usual robust affability.

“There’s been an outage, sir. How do you say? A cut in the power supply. The kitchen is barely functional. You may prefer to eat elsewhere?” the waiter replied.

“Barely is not the same as totally, is it, Luigi?” smiled Ted reassuringly and the man squinted, pouted his lips and finally acquiesced. “So you must be able to cook us something surely? We’ve all travelled a long way and are veritably starving.” our persuasive friend added and picked up a menu with a thespian flourish. “Now then, let’s take a gander,” he suggested imperiously. “I’ll point and you tell us off or on. Okay? Number one, Chateaubriand steak?”

“Sorry, sir. Off.”

Twenty-five sorries later and humiliation complete, Ted concluded his interrogation with a smirk, “That leaves just the Spaghetti Bolognaise.” At which the waiter’s eyes lit up with a kind of religious fervour.

“Yes, sir. No problem at all,” he enthused. “It will be my pleasure to serve you all with a free bottle of house wine in addition.”

“It took a long time but we finally got there,” muttered Ivan.

“No we haven’t,” objected Norman. “What about me? I’m a vegetarian!”

Luigi looked confused as if he did not understand the concept. “I bet the All Blacks didn’t have to put up with this sort of service!” quipped Ronnie nodding towards a team photograph mounted on the wall to celebrate their last visit.

In the end Norman managed to negotiate a tomato and garlic sauce to accompany his pasta and we allowed the poor, emotionally bedraggled dogsbody to skulk apologetically back to the kitchen. After the meal Ivan took issue with Ted’s overbearingly pompous management of the situation. “I’ve never seen anybody quite so embarrassed,” he said. “My guess is that the chef failed to turn in for work and Luigi was sent out to paper over the cracks.”

“Less a crack than a gaping chasm!” guffawed Ted who had demanded and obtained a second gratuitous bottle of red and was now emptying its dregs into his glass.

“I have,” chimed in Norman carelessly. “Seen someone more excruciatingly embarrassed, I mean. In fact – well, never mind.”

“Come on, Norm, don’t sit on a good story,” urged Ted. “We all want to hear it, don’t we lads?”

That’s how it became launched – our embarrassing story club – during a drunken meal, inhibitions jettisonned, the gross, the ugly and the idiotic beatified.

“How come you’re so interested in other people’s shame?” I rode to Norman’s rescue. I had never seen Ted remotely embarrassed by anything in his whole life.

“I don’t know,” grinned Ted with a shrug of indifference. “You’ll have to get back to me on that one.”

“Pratfalls are just funny,” opined Ivan. “Especially when they happen to the wise and self-important. They’re a social leveler.”

“Exactly,” agreed Norman who now, having been given time to reconsider his rashly recalled claim, decided to entertain us with a full confession. “In this case the prat was me. It happened during my first year at university. I was living in digs at the time. A very nice couple owned the house. I had my own attic room and they couldn’t do enough for me. Treated me like the son they’d never had. One day I misplaced my wrist watch. I searched around the house but couldn’t find it anywhere. So before I went out to college that morning I asked my landlady if she would do a reccy. When I returned home that evening she was nowhere to be seen. Within seconds her husband confronted me and ordered me to pack my bags immediately and clear off. I was no longer wanted in their home. I couldn’t believe it. What have I done to upset you? I asked more than once but he just wafted me away and threatened to call the police. You know very well, he growled, and I had no choice but to obey. The next day I was summoned by my tutor to his office and given a severe bollocking. You’ve let yourself and the college down in the way you’ve treated that poor woman, he reprimanded me. I told him I had no idea what I was supposed to have done and clearly he didn’t believe me. Do you deny that this is your handwriting then? he demanded, showing me a sheet of paper ripped from a notepad. Your landlady found it on your bed when she went into your room to look for your wrist watch. I was mortified to read in my large loopy scrawl the words Fuck off you nosey cunt! But – but, I stammered, there’s been a misunderstanding! I did write that while I was working in the library and left it inside my folder when I went for lunch. You see, there’s a bloke called Wally in my year who sneaks around the library when I’m not there and cribs from my essays. I must have dumped the notepad still open on my bed with my books when I came home……….My tutor clearly didn’t believe a word of it. He gave me a verbal warning and sent me packing with my tail between my legs.”

We all had a good laugh. “And you never went back to clear up the misunderstanding with your landlady?” asked Ted. Norman shook his head as if still suffering from the shame of it. “You just wrote off your wrist watch?”

“No, actually I discovered it in my sports kit bag,” he replied.

“We all did stupid things when we were undergraduates,” mused Ivan.

“And so it continues, no doubt,” added Ronnie. “We must do this again sometime?”

“Absolutely,” enjoined Ted. “Next year, the second week in May. Put it in the diary.”

“No, I meant own up to our indiscretions,” said Ronnie lugubriously. “They say confession is good for the soul. And none of us are spring chickens.”

On that somewhat ominous note we paid our bills and said goodbye. Privately I anticipated on the bus home that this resolution would be forgotten when sobriety became restored to us but time would prove me wrong – as it has done on numerous other occasions throughout my life.