PICTURED:Roger Bunn and Dave Ward
N&W’s Dave Ward inadvertently became the center of attention at the AVA’s Burns Night bash…
‘Roger Bunn (of Crane) and a few others are going to walk the length of Hadrian’s Wall for the charity Edukaid’, Dave told PV, ‘so when he grabbed the mic after dinner we all thought he was about to plug the event.’ No surprises there, then, but what followed had the incoming AVA Chair in knots…
‘He said he’d been promised £100 of sponsorship by Maggie Ritchie of Caledonian Vending if there was somebody in the audience wearing a real bow-tie who was prepared to come out front and re-tie it.’ Now, here at PV Towers we have no such thing as a ‘real’ bow tie. In fact, Mr. R-Y, in common with most modern chaps, uses a fake, ‘just-clip-it-on-and-pretend’ black tie; and , as it turned out, Dave Ward was the only chap in the room wearing the real thing…
‘At this point’, Dave confesses, ‘I’m trying to hide under the table because even though I have a real bow tie it takes me ages to tie it properly, and that’s with a set of written instructions and a mirror to help me.’
Dave’s hiding was in vain: not only was he the only possible candidate for what was bound to be an embarrassing spectacle, but the lovely Mrs. Geraldine Ward, unbeknown to her squirming-under-the-table husband, was busily attracting Roger’s attention, whilst the assembled great and good howled their encouragement.
‘The next thing I know’, Dave says, ‘there I am in front of everybody like a rabbit in the headlights with the tie undone and the whole room laughing at me…’
He needn’t have fretted though: with a little help from Geraldine he managed to get the tie ‘ninety percent right’ before returning to his seat, or, as he puts it, ‘scuttling off back to my drink.’
And so Edukaid was £100 better off and Dave’s ‘turn’ was well received… Having said that, if we were Roger Bunn, we’d be worried that it’s just a matter of time before Dave finds a way of getting his own back – for the benefit of charity, naturally!
*By the way, if you missed PV’s feature on Caledonian Vending, catch up here.
