Last Thursday it was my pleasure to briefly meet the broadcaster Kate Humble, at a book signing.

I am a fond admirer of Kate’s, but that may be because I am biased. After all, we are practically related.

You see, my brother-in-law lives nextdoor to Kate’s parents. You may have seen their house when it featured on an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?

For years now I have been hoping to share this information on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Radio 2, where they have an entertaining little slot, every day, called The Top Tenuous. This is where listeners are encouraged to tweet or email their connection to somebody or something selected from the day’s news. And the more tenuous the link, the better.

It’s a game anybody can play privately, and if - like me - you are easily distracted when you have more important things you should be doing with your brain, you can compile your own list.

For added measure, sometimes there are even tenuous connections that link your tenuous connections to one another. For instance... A friend of mine once owned a former hearse that he later sold to Pete Townshend of The Who.

Another friend is the son of Edmund ‘Monty’ Mortimer, who worked for Garrard in Swindon and invented the record changer on the kitchen table of his home in Gorse Hill.

My brother plays tennis with Colin Moulding, who was the bass player with XTC and wrote the hit record, Making Plans for Nigel. He didn’t recognise Colin when they first met, asked him if he worked, and was told, rather modestly: “I used to be in a band.”

I once received a telephone call from a member of The Beatles. It was Pete Best, the drummer before Ringo, and he was calling from his agent’s office for a pre-arranged interview about a gig he was doing in Swindon.

My drum teacher appeared in two FA Cup finals. He was a drummer in the military band that entertained the crowd, before the match and during half-time. Celebrated classical pianist Paul Turner was in the year above me at school (Kingsdown), and a couple of years below was Paul Rideout, who scored the winning goal for Everton in the 1995 FA Cup final.

My sister and brother-in-law used to live opposite Kenny Stroud, the Swindon Town footballer who famously won an ITV goal of the season competition after scoring against Everton in the FA Cup in 1977.

My Auntie Eileen used to run a B&B in Penzance, and, one summer, legendary Swindon Town footballer Don Rogers was a guest there. My in-laws used to live next door to the in-laws of Frank Burrows, who was one of Don Rogers’ team mates in the League Cup-winning team of 1969, and later manager of Portsmouth.

When I was a student in Portsmouth in 1979, I once visited a chip shop near the Kings Theatre, Southsea, and DJ Tony Blackburn, who was appearing in the panto, was eating his dinner there.

My first visit to Harrods, the London department store, was on December 16, 1983, and the following day it was bombed by the IRA. When I got married on August 15, 1987, it was the day after the centenary of the death of the Swindon-born naturalist, Richard Jefferies.

A few years ago, I conducted an interview for this paper with Marc Almond of Soft Cell, and we had a nice chat about the fact that we share a birthday. Talking of sharing birthdays: my twin brother’s mother-in-law’s father was a friend of Robert Graves, who wrote I, Claudius.

Beat that.