I'VE got to stop this business of speaking without thinking first.

It's going to get me in trouble one of these days.

Take the other morning, for example. I'd just closed the garden gate, on way to the bus stop, when a matronly lady out walking her dogs (two, for the record) approached me.

"Excuse me," she said. "Have you got the time on you? My mum's just died."

I reeled. "I'm so, so sorry," I said. And then: "It's 10 to 11."

Matronly Lady gave me the sort of startled look she would have given dog No 1 (or No 2) if it had started foaming at the mouth.

"Thank you," she replied. "I'll charge it when I get home."

And then the penny dropped. It was her phone that had died, not her mother; which I probably would have twigged if I'd taken half a second to analyse what my cloth ears had reported.

It's not the first time this sort of thing has happened recently. I confidently relayed a station announcement to a fellow traveller at Edinburgh Waverley, telling him that the train to Newcraighall was leaving from platform 11, when it was in fact seven. Thankfully, one passes the former on the way to the latter. And a friend's niece isn't getting married in a den in her garden, romantic though that sounds; she's getting hitched to a bloke from Cardenden.

I once misheard a pub conversation, too. I eventually worked out that the mutual friend the worthies at the bar were discussing hadn't been banned from discos, but from Tesco's. I never did find out why; being off his trolley would cover both scenarios, I suppose.

It is tempting here to wander here down the byways of misheard song lyrics - touched for the 31st time, donuts make my brown eyes blue, that sort of thing - but that subject has been covered at length elsewhere. Besides, I doubt I could accurately relate any lyric of a later vintage than Tea For Two.

I fear it may be an age thing. I recall my old dad once thought I'd challenged him to game of wheesht (which, come to think of it, is a game I should get around to inventing for the grandkids).

This is a phenomenon the great PG Wodehouse knew well. In Carry On, Jeeves - don't stop me if you've heard this one - Bertie Wooster relates the old gag about two elderly gents on a train. "Is this Wembley?" "No, it's Thursday." "So am I. Let's go for a drink."

Ah, well. Ours is not to season pie, as Tennyson said in The Charge of the Light Brigade. Or something like that, anyway.