About 18 months ago, a British newspaper rang and asked me to fly to Sydney to interview a man called David Helfgott, whose life story had been made into a film.
This film was due to open in London in early 1997 and the word filtering out of Australia was that it would be an unexpected hit.
So little did I know about the project that while making notes during that phone conversation I scribbled down what I thought was the name of the film: Shy. I don't think the paper realised what was involved either. It wasn't until I went into a cinema in Sydney and watched Shine that it became apparent that an interview with David Helfgott would be an extraordinary - but, in all professional honesty, impossible - experience.
We now know about Shine, the true story of how an Australian Jewish boy's love of music brought him into conflict with his Holocaust-survivor father; how he was disowned by the father when he left home to study in London; his nervous breakdown while playing Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 3; how he became institutionalised and was saved only by the love of a good woman - an astrologer, called Gillian.
And it was Gillian, in the end, whom I interviewed. We sat next to a swimming-pool at a hotel in Adelaide while David, whooping and splashing, ploughed up and down in the water like an exuberant seal.
It was the last week of October, 1996, and Gillian was planning a 1997 World Tour. She was surrounded by an impressive leafstorm of papers as she juggled dates and venues. There were continuous phone calls. Every now and then David shouted over to his visitor, 'I'm famous, famous, famous, you came to see me!' and Gillian replied, absently, from amidst her thicket of faxes, 'You're a lucky little Vegemite.' Last Saturday afternoon, Gillian sat next to a different swimming pool, at The Peninsula, where the Helfgotts are currently installed in the hotel's Garden Suite, complete with telescope for David's happy perusal of passing shipping.
They were flown to Hong Kong, for the sold-out concert David will perform at the Cultural Centre tonight, by Ansett Australia - first class - Gillian revealed, along with the pointed comment, 'And people talk about exploitation . . . they say he's gone downhill since he met me.' Indeed, a great deal of water, much of it exceedingly murky, has flowed under the proverbial bridge for the Helfgotts between those two meetings.