Cadet journalists would ask why they were required to learn shorthand. Was it really that important?

Yes and no, I would say. Shorthand could be a good servant but a bad master. If you used it with your mind in neutral, which really was the danger, you could easily miss the significance of what you were taking down. It was a skill that needed to be used with mental alertness.

Not having been through a cadet course, I never learned shorthand. The closest I came was a kind of speedwriting, mostly of my own manufacture.

Only once was I almost caught in the breach. It was when I was working on the Western Morning News and Evening Herald in Plymouth, England.

I had applied for the reporting job from London and went down a day before the final interview. I discovered which pub the local journalists frequently, found a few there and introduced myself.

“South African?” said one. “How’s your shorthand?”  Non-existent, I said.

“Well,” he said. “The editor always tests applicants by asking the shorthand form for two words. ‘Hospital’ and ‘ambulance’. Nothing else.”

There and then, they taught me how to scribble the two words and the next morning it all went as planned. Except that the editor then asked me my shorthand speed.

“Speed?” I said. “Yes, how many words a minute?” he said.

I had no idea what the average shorthand speed was but had to say something. “About one-twenty words a minute,” I said.

His eyebrows shot up. “Really?” he said. “A hundred and twenty? That’s very good!”

Some weeks later, the printers of the Kellogg’s cereal boxes began a nation-wide strike. It spread to the printers of provincial newspapers. A few of the smaller publications never recovered.

But our editor had a plan. He called me into his office. “We can’t use our presses because of the silly strike, but I want to produce three editions of the Morning News on our roneo machines.

“We’ll obviously get news from our own reporters but the agencies are also  affected by the strike. Now, you are far and away the best shorthand writer we have. So I want you to monitor the BBC radio news and give us the contents of every broadcast.”

Dark gloom! The next few weeks were hell. But somehow I got through them with a hugely tested memory and improvisation. When the strike ended, the editor said he was extremely grateful. So was I.

Still, my ordeal brought me several new friends, mainly from the group who knew about my shorthand disability. Another was a Welshman, John Summers, the only other reporter not from Devon. John and I had something else in common. The previous year I had worked for some months behind the bar at the Taff’s Well Inn, near Cardiff. He was from Swansea.

I had an old Fordson van, and on our time off the two of us would sight-see. On one occasion, we heard that author John Steinbeck was in Kingsbridge. “Let’s go and interview him,” said John.

We pooled our money, brought a large and expensive bunch of flowers, and found the cottage where the Steinbecks were staying. We knocked on the front door and John Steinbeck opened it.

“We brought these for your wife,” we said. “Thank you very much,” said Steinbeck and promptly closed the door.

One of John Summers’s ambitions was to sail the Atlantic. I was planning to emigrate to Canada at some stage anyway. We located a yacht for sale that had made the trip several times and began preparations.

First, we needed to be conditioned to open water. When we weren’t working, we would hire a runabout and putter around Plymouth Sound among the ships. Getting bolder, we drove to Salcombe and hired a sailing dinghy from a firm owned by the Queen’s Yachtsman, Uffa Fox.

We set out and, in the middle of the bay, hoisted the sail. The dinghy almost overturned. Fox himself raced out in a runabout and yelled, “Put down the bloody centreboard!”

John’s  Atlantic ambition cooled after that but he had another: to write a book (faction, fiction based on fact) about Dylan Thomas, and the poet’s tragic life. He found it deplorable that someone with that talent should have died so young and alone in New York, alcohol addicted and penniless.

On our trips around, John Summers would recite Thomas’s poems at length, in his own Welsh accent, in particular the poem about death: “Do not go gentle into that good night”  . . . “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

Later that year, I left Plymouth and returned to London. For a while, John and I kept in touch. He moved to the Sunday Telegraph and covered the Aberfan mining disaster in 1966. He personally filed a writ to the High Court on behalf of the survivors and bereaved, and eventually had the money in the relief fund unlocked.

After I came back to Africa, the contact was broken.

But this week I traced John Summers on Google. He had continued to have an eventful life. He wrote a novel about Aberfan called “Edge of Violence” which Treasury lawyers tried to ban. He interviewed Winston Churchill in the last year of his life.

He became a full-time writer and travelled the world via Australia and Canada. He wrote about his travels, a novel about growing up in Wales during the Depression, another entitled “Rag Parade”.

Also, fulfilling that second ambition, a book called “Dylan” which was a mixture of events in Thomas’s life and his own.

And, ironically and tragically, when John Summers died in 2008, there was a mirror image of Dylan Thomas in that too. He had become embroiled with the Swansea council over the release of his second wife’s will. He was forced to leave the marital home and move into a council flat.

After a demand for £6,000 in back taxes on that home, he wrote to his friend Harry Greene. “I’ve come to the end of my life, Harry . . . Every penny I possessed — gone. House gone. Everything gone.”

When Greene received the letter, he immediately alerted Swansea police, who broke into John Summers’s flat and found him already dead, apparently of natural causes.

Whether my friend John went “gentle into that good night”, or whether he “raged against the dying of the light”, only he could know.

A week for banquets, two in as many nights, requiring frantic relaundering of my only dress shirt. Does anybody have more than one? Other than waiters, toastmasters and Anglo American chairmen?

Speaking of toastmasters, there was a good Master of Ceremonies at the first do. The head of the group throwing this particular bunfight was from the Free State so the MC had a ready tale about Free Staters. Similarly, he was able to identity in light vein with the guest speaker, who was from Washington; and finished by telling an ethnic joke involving the co-sponsor.

It was a decided improvement on the average black-tie evening, with overworked and often unrelated anecdotes.

In the matter of after-dinner speaking, we follow the Americans. We believe for a speech to be acceptable it must be started – and often ended – with a funny story.

Mr Jones, whose field is making conduits for waste products, will begin by saying that drains always remind him of the story of Pat and Mike who become marooned on a desert island and encounter a passing mermaid.

The polite laughter that greets this totally irrelevant piece of fiction then encourages Mr Jones to embark on his speech, proper, which invariably will begin with “I shall not take up much of your time tonight” and end, 50 minutes later, with “but I have taken up too much of your time already”.

British speakers, good British speakers, seldom feel the need to tell funny stories. Bad ones trot out the old chestnut about the Christian in the Colosseum who talks a succession of lions out of having him for dinner. (“I merely told them they’d have to make a speech afterwards.”) But the aim in public-speaking in Britain is to entertain one’s audience by quality of language and delivery, rather than cloak-room narratives.

Personally, I tend to follow the British. On occasions when I am dragged, kicking and screaming, to a podium, I seldom attempt to tell jokes. That may take aback people who expect I might, as the writer of an allegedly humorous column.

Not that I do much to entertain by language and delivery. But experience has taught me that as a raconteur of funny stories, I should have stood in bed.

It happens even when I try to tell a story in the pub. Either I am bound to get the punchline wrong or else, more usually, I find I am interrupted before I can even get that far. People have an uncanny knack for upstaging me that way.

What occurred in the club the other day is typical. I was telling the rest of the group a story about a man on a train who reads page one and two of his newspaper, then crumples it up and throws it out of the window. He does the same with pages three and four and the rest of the paper, crumpling up every page and throwing them out of the window.

A woman sitting opposite says, “Excuse me, why did you do that?”

“Do what?” says the man.

“You tore up your newspaper and threw the pages out of the window.”

“Well,” says the man, “it keeps the tigers away.”

At that point, the member who had won the previous night’s weekly draw walked in. Immediately, attention was shifted in that direction and the clamour grew for him to buy a round. In the melee, I was forgotten.

By everyone but Dick. Courteous to a fault, is old Dick.

“Sorry, John,” he said. “You were telling us . . .”

“Yes,” I said. “So then the woman says, “’But there are no tigers around here!”

“’That’s right,’” says the man. “’Very effective, isn’t it?’”

Dick looked pensively into his glass. “I see,” he said. “H’mm.”

My wife told me a story some weeks ago, which she’d heard from someone in her department, about a family of worms – a mother worm, father worm and little worm – who, for a reason undisclosed, were obliged to cross a motorway.

When they got safely to the other side, the little worm exclaimed, “And now there are four of us.”

Why, my wife wanted to know from me, was that little worm’s arithmetic awry?  I couldn’t tell her. “Because,” she said with an air of triumph, “little worms can’t count.”

The story bothered me. To an extent that it kept me awake a good deal of that night.

I woke my wife too. “That worms story of yours,” I said. “You sure you got the punchline right?”

“Of course,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

I couldn’t leave it there. Somewhere, I felt, the story had become adulterated, had come to lose something vital in translation. No one could have thought up a joke so outstandingly unfunny.

I examined the components. The worms; one small, two large. The motorway. Why a motorway? Now there are four of us, the little worm had said. Any significance in the number four? Why should they be worms anyway?

And then, suddenly, it came to me. Of course! They weren’t worms at all. They were snakes. Mother snake, father snake and little snake. And the little snake had got his arithmetic all wrong  – because he was no adder!

    I decided to wait until morning to tell my wife. “Nonsense!” she said. “They were worms. I heard that part quite clearly.”

A woman at the next table on the first night told the worms version, and her companions fell about laughing.

I decided not to put them right. If there’s anything worse in company than a mis-told joke, it’s the wise guy you tells you it is.

Time Wounds All Heels column