My pleasure at the news that George Melly's considerable contribution to British jazz had been recognised with a lifetime achievement honour in this year's BBC Jazz Awards, was tempered only slightly by a petulant curiosity as to whether he'd been wearing my tie when he went up to the rostrum to accept it.
He acquired the relevant neck wear during his last visit to Hong Kong (I think in 1997), when he performed at the Jazz Club and also accepted an invitation to speak to a lunchtime audience at the Foreign Correspondents' Club. I was seated next to him, and from the soup course on he kept looking at my tie - the only decent one I possessed as it happened - and saying how much he liked it.
In England there used to be, and for all I know still is, a tradition that when members of the British royal family descended on a private home and pointedly admired a particular object the owner was expected to hand it over. It gradually dawned on me that 'Goodtime George' - British jazz royalty, without a question - was not so subtly exercising the same right. I duly passed it across and I assume that, from time to time, the tie now decorates one of the jazz world's most distinctive throats.
My only qualm is that it may not have been quite loud enough for a man who's also an authority on surrealist art, and who has furthermore gone through life with a personality that nobody has ever described as 'quiet'. During the lunch I particularly enjoyed a shocked pause from the audience, before the laugh, when he described his experience as a formerly gay man of discovering heterosexual sex. 'Much the same thing really. It's just that you can see the face.'
A lifetime achievement it's certainly been - partially chronicled in three volumes of autobiography recently compiled into a single paperback by Penguin - and Melly has in his time played many parts.
Born in 1926 he was of a generation that was allowed to be good at more than one thing, and has been equally successful as a performer, writer, broadcaster and critic. During the 1960s he was mostly known for his sharp critical mind. Melly covered cinema for The Observer, also writing and lecturing on surrealism, one of the great passions of his life. He also produced one of the few genuinely perceptive books about pop written in its early years: Revolt Into Style.
He was, in those recently compiled books - Scouse Mouse, Rum Bum and Concertina, and Owning Up, the last giving its title to the compendium - the pioneer of a wittily confessional autobiographical style that many have since attempted with much less honesty and far less grace.