PEOPLE are fascinated by celebrity. We flock in our thousands to catch a glimpse of Peter Andre at our local Asda and queue in the cold for hours to see Katie Price sign books in Waterstone’s.

I did my best to miss both these engagements, but I did toy for a moment with taking my youngest daughter to see Katie, who happens to be her idol. “Is she really coming – can we go?” she begged.

I shouldn’t mock. I remember when I was her age, I would have crossed continents to see Donny Osmond or David Cassidy. And I clearly remember the famous faces I met as a teenager, some of whose names are scrawled in my autograph book.

Most came from my days selling programmes at Middlesbrough Football Club. With my friend’s dad being the manager, Jack Charlton, we got to sit in the directors’ box and share sandwiches and cakes with the players afterwards. I met quite a few soccer greats such as Kevin Keegan, complete with his tightly-curled, wet-look perm.

I sat two along from Virginia Wade at a tennis match, met Chris Rea who was close friends with our neighbours and literally bumped into a very small Dennis Waterman in a London street.

These encounters are fleeting, and would not qualify me for inclusion in a new book, I Was Douglas Adam’s Flatmate, which describes the times ordinary people have spent with those who were to become legends.

I couldn’t qualify with those experiences, but I might just scrape in with my encounter with one very well-known personality. It took place in 1983, when my then boyfriend, Chris, and I were hitchhiking from Yorkshire to London. We were picked up in a battered white car (BMW, I think) driven by the then little-known Stephen Fry.

As we went to get in, a man emerged from nearby bushes and sprinted towards us. He pushed past Chris and got in the front passenger seat. With a shaven head, he was dressed as if travelling to an extreme right-wing rally, in knee-high DMs, jeans, white shirt and braces. No one said a word, and we set off.

There was a tense atmosphere in which the man barely spoke and, after about an hour, he suddenly bellowed: “Stop!” and we pulled over on the hard shoulder of the motorway. He got out, leapt over a fence and ran off across a ploughed field.

I’m sure that Fry, who at the time I’d seen on TV in the Cambridge Footlights, would remember. I’d love to ask him.