We’ve all got a least favourite musical instrument haven’t we? Mine may be the flute, though the twittering of the piccolo might win if it were not such a rarity. Then there’s the universal horror of the pan pipes.

As soon as you hear them you’re transported to an imaginary hotel lobby or spa, where their insipid warbling will soundtrack your massage.

Or perhaps a TV commercial for some exotic destination, almost certainly involving forests, mountains and streams, in someone’s mistaken belief that the sound is “relaxing.” It isn’t.

Once, on a day when I was flying abroad, I saw one of those groups of four or five men on Oxford Street dressed in “Peruvian” ponchos playing pan pipes in the morning.

I swar that when I arrived in a new European city that afternoon, I saw them again on the streets of Milan or Madrid, busking for funds that might hopefully earn them enough for a flight back to Peru. Or possibly Romania.

Because it all began with this bloke, Gheorghe Zamfir, back in 1976, when this tune, Doina De Jale – the theme from a BBC religious show called The Light of Experience – inexplicably captured the hearts of British music fans and reached no.4.

Far more explicably, it was the Romanian’s only hit, and the tune turns out to be a traditional Romanian funeral song. As if you couldn’t tell from its dirgey sound.