Visiting family always seems to involve a boozy dinner with alittle too much red wine, or at least ours do.

And as always with coneversations involving a decent red, sometimes they take some slightly odd turns.

And so it was a few days ago, ironically on the 101st anniversary of the Russian revolution.

We were talking about family history and where various strands of the family had come from. Most of us have been fairly ordinary hardworking folk, in Scotland, or the north of England, or by marriage, Ireland, or more accurately London Irish.

And the story was that when he was small, the great grandfather on the London Irish side worked as a newspaper seller and used to sell Lenin a copy of the Evening Standard most days.

I’m not sure how you would ever prove this, but the dates fit – the London Irish GGF was born in 1894 making him eight or nine in 1902 when Lenin was in London.

However I’m sure he didn’t know at the time who the foreign gentleman he sold his paper to was – however he did go on to be a trade union shop steward, and probably realised afterwards that he might have been selling Lenin his paper.

But memory of course can be a funny thing. It could have been Trotsky, or indeed any other memorable delegate to the 1902 RSDLP party congress that was held in exile in London …