As Leo Rosten's indomitable if eminently imitable Hyman Kaplan put it, ‘First, I Was Born'l – on the twenty-eighth of July 1932 to my good Fabian Socialist parents in the Neasden Humanist Nursing Home, where they came round in the evening to ask “Have you had your options open today?”. My mother with her teasing sense of humour would have been in and out of her element there. After having either my elder brother John or me she sprang a serious puerperal fever, what Mistress Quickly called a burning quotidian tertian, and the third or fourth time her temperature shot into the middle 100s the jolly doctor said “Well, well, what are we up to, Mrs. Black?” – to which the jolly Mrs. Black replied that she was trying to see how many times she could rise on the third day without ascending into heaven. For grace under pressure I rate that somewhere above my own best effort in Vienna's Wilhelminenspital, to be narrated in due course.

The home address on my birth certificate is 10 The Avenue, Brondesbury, a grey-brick house that, seen in passing, looks surprisingly like 112 Chetwynd Road, Kentish Town, jointly bought in 1984 by Felicity and myself. As to my names, a mere eight letters were thought adequate (John had fared as badly – a letter more, a syllable fewer). Confusion was inbuilt from the start. At elementary school, having read The Boy Mozart, I for a while took my first name to be short for Leopold, much to classmates’ amusement, while later, well into my very-young-looking thirties, the combination of Christian name and surname more than once prompted elderly and presumably purblind Anglo-Austrian ladies to ask “Are you the Mr. Leo Blech who conducted that wonderful record of Beethoven's Violin Concerto with Fritz Kreisler?” – it had been made a bit before I was born. To worse-confound the confusion, ever since student days in Oxford I have from time to time been mixed up in people's minds with the outstanding oboist Neil Black, a fellow student for whom I wrote cadenzas when during my final year he played the Mozart C major Concerto with Jack Westrup's University Orchestra.