As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm a little over 6 feet 5 inches. That's quite a long way short of 8 feet 11 inches, the tallest height recorded for a man (Robert Pershing Wadlow for fact fans).

It's not even much good for basketball. In a shortlived period on the '80s, Channel 4 showed UK basketball matches live on a Monday evening. The best team at the time were the Solent Stars and their captain was called Karl Tatham. He was about 6 feet 5 and looked kind of short on a basketball court, especially beside the 6 feet 10 Mark Saiers.

So am I even qualified to talk about being tall?

According to some stats I found on a web search, so treat them as sceptically as you wish, average UK adult male height is 69.3” (just a smidge over 5 feet 9). furthermore the standard deviation is 2.8”. Don't worry - it's not getting much more stats heavy than this. This means that 3 standard deviations from the midpoint is 77.7”, and thus about 1 in 700 men in the UK will be taller than me (and, no doubt, a few women too).

Given that 700 is a reasonably large number of people, if you know me I am probably the tallest person you know; at least the tallest you know well. (I am not, however, the tallest person I know, of which more later.)

So I think that still gives me some legitimacy in talking about height and its quirks, even if I am a bit of a shorty as far as extremes of height go.