Guess which three words greeted me when I took my first step into a cardroom a couple of years ago and noticed a sea of heads turning to me like a crowd of tennis fans following a Federer smash? ‘Beppe, you fish!’ Charming. This remark was actually a breath of fresh air.

You see, normally I just get called plain old ‘Beppe’, or when someone has had a few too many Babychams, ‘Beppe, you c:;….’ (For those of you who aren’t Eastenders fans I played a character called Beppe for many years.) But this time the word ‘fish’ had a strangely endearing quality.