Long ago and far, far away, I was on a press trip to visit a BASF tape factory in Germany. Well, soot factory, actually, as we traipsed round a plant making the chrome dioxide used to coat tapes back then.
We had dinner with a very elderly senior manager, who was asking all of us the usual small-talk things - what kind of music we liked, where in England we lived, that sort of stuff.
One journalist said that he lived in the West Midlands, and asked the old boy if he knew the area at all. There was a pause, and then "No, but I flew over it a few times many years ago..."