The day George Best overtook me in a Lotus on the Harrogate Road

The swinging 60s never really caught on at King James’s grammar school in Knaresborough (founded 1616). Here the school song was a hymn of praise to obedience. Loyalty to house, school, Queen and country was the primary virtue. But in the autumn of 1969, at the age of 12, I thrillingly left that staid, if kindly, world behind to come face to face with the personification of the radical, excessive spirit of the age.

He was in a sports car and I was in a family saloon, but George Best and I briefly occupied the same patch of Yorkshire road. I had first become aware of Best when as a 21-year-old he inspired Manchester United to win the European Cup in 1968. I watched on our black and white TV, entranced by this handsome Irishman, who played the game of life according to different rules.

Just over a year later, in the dying days of the 60s, Best and United were playing at Leeds, 20 miles or so away from where I lived. That was close enough to persuade my father, who had never shown any interest in football, to take me to my first match. Best scored twice. The second, to put Manchester United 2-1 up, was one of the finest of his career – a ferocious snapshot with no backlift from 25 yards. Lithe and effortlessly subversive on the pitch, Best undid Leeds with endlessly witty feet. In the flesh, he was unlike anything I’d seen before.

Driving home, Dad took the Harrogate Road. As our Volkswagen proceeded cautiously from a set of traffic lights, a yellow Lotus Europa overtook at reckless speed, accelerating to beat the lights. Two faces in the car flashed by – that of a young driver with a black mane of hair and a beautiful blonde woman.

“Who’s that idiot?” said my father. I had an inkling, but it was only later, watching the Nine O’Clock News, that I understood that the “idiot” was indeed George Best. Following his starring role against Leeds, Best had flown directly to Belfast to introduce his 19-year-old Danish fiancée, Eva Haraldsted, to his parents. He had taken the acclaim of the United fans, showered, changed, spoken to journalists, found Eva and still managed to overtake my Dad on the way to the airport.

I went on to actually meet Best twice, once as an adoring 14-year-old hanging around the forecourt of Old Trafford and again during his tragic decline, in the Phene Arms in Chelsea. But it was that moment on the Leeds-Harrogate road in 1969, with his young fiancée by his side, that provided a luminous moment of grace in my childhood; a revelation that threw the gates of Knaresborough wide open, so the possibilities beyond twinkled and shone.

“Who’s that idiot?” would enter family legend, to be facetiously suggested as a possible title for the never-to-be-written autobiography of my prudent, gentle father.

The documentary George Best: All By Himself is on sale now on DVD