As you get older your head fills up with superfluous names - names you can't get rid of, but that won't be any use to you any more. People you worked with for a couple of weeks, 15 years ago on a different continent, people who ran the newsagents where your Mum and Dad used to live and all sorts of people from the media. Old newsreaders, French foreign ministers, Dutch swimmers. Mostly this is fine, these names are just the dusty gatherings in the back of your mind, but occasionally this bag of unregarded names gets jumbled up and unfortunate confusions ensues.
I, for instance, always confuse Peter Baynham (top comedy-writer but most resonantly in my head the very sad Welsh man from Fist of Fun) with Peter Fincham (TV executive occasionally talked about on media programmes). Not in a permanent way, I sort it out quite quickly, but still, always, when I'm reading about or listening to Peter Fincham I'm thinking about a lonely man in Balham in a filthy t-shirt. Presumably, given the limited amount of names in the world, this effect will only get worse and more and more people will get slightly confused in my head.
So apologies if I look at you vacantly at some point in the future.
