EARLIER this month the Diary revealed Robin Rawson's close encounter with the shadow home secretary. (David Davis, you may recall, looked after Robin's shopping while he took his little boy for a poo at Monks Cross. And didn't steal anything).

At the time we asked for more reader brushes with fame. Whose story should emerge? Only that of Georgina Hardcastle - Robin's mum. No disrespect to her son, but Georgina's encounter was of an altogether starrier status.

We are in 1988 and she is working as a chiropodist at Scholl in Parliament Street, York. One day a call comes through from a city hotel. "We have a VIP staying here who would like a pedicure in his hotel room. He would be happy to pay handsomely for such treatment," is the message.

Georgina agrees and heads to the hotel wondering who the guest could be. A big businessman with bunions? A flat-footed chief constable? She knocks on the room door, and inside finds... Moses, Michelangelo and Marc Antony.

The treatment went ahead fairly routinely with Charlton Heston not saying much, preferring to read his magazine instead. He was in York to play Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons at the Theatre Royal.

Georgina wasn't overawed to be underneath the arches of a Hollywood luminary. "For a man that's spent the majority of his acting career wearing sandals, he had pretty ropey feet," she later commented.

BACK, somehow inevitably, to the C-word. On Wednesday we revealed York University student newspaper Nouse's foiled attempt to splash the expletive all over a supplement cover. That has drawn an interesting debate on its origins.

Bill Cooper, of Newton-on-Ouse, rang to tell the Diary that a version of the word was once used to mean the sheath or scabbard of a knife.

Meanwhile Rachel Lacy, who featured in this column yesterday on the contrasting topic of Yorkshire puddings, emailed her own thoughts. "It was made an offensive to print the word around 1700 - has this law been revoked? If not, is Vogue being taken to court?

"Even the Oxford English Dictionary avoided it for a long time."

Not so modern reference works, though, Rachel. If you type the infamous four letters into Collins' online dictionary it not only defines the word, but announces that it will give you a score of six in Scrabble...

FINALLY for this week, back to Nance Turner-Collings, the York clairvoyant and visionaries co-ordinator for Leeds-based Vision magazine, who failed to foretell her own pregnancy. "I read with interest about the gentleman Kenneth Barnes who can predict the sex of the babies his woman relatives are having," she tells us.

"But I just have to say that actually I did know what sex my baby was going to be, much to the shock - don't know why - of my husband.

"Call it women's instinct, but I bet if you ask 90 per cent of women they will tell you they knew what they were having."

Fathers have instincts, too Nance: the Diary was clueless about our first (a boy) but confidently predicted a boy for the second (a girl).

"Anyway, my mum's finding it quite funny that she keeps seeing my name in your section," says Nance. "You have to have a sense of humour, otherwise what a dull life people would have!"

Updated: 10:40 Friday, March 17, 2006