Here's the story of how my portrait ended up hanging on the wall of a house in America.

When I was about six or seven years old, my dad got the wife of one of his work colleagues to paint three portraits of me - one wearing my school rugby shirt, one wearing a normal collared shirt, and one wearing a polo-neck sweater.

My dad kept the rugby shirt one - obviously it has sporting significance, not least because it must have been the first and last time anyone saw me in a school rugby shirt.

My mum kept the one with the collared shirt, and the third one - with me in the polo-neck - went to my nan and grandad. However, by common consent the polo-neck portrait wasn't as good as the other two.

Let's fast forward 15 years to Wednesday evening, at which point my dad suddenly remembers he has a story to tell me.

Earlier in the week, the same old work colleague had returned to the business to see how everybody was getting on. My dad had asked after his family and that had reminded his old colleague of an odd phone call they had recently received.

When they answered the phone, on the other end of the line was an American voice, explaining that they were dialling the phone number found on the back of a portrait in their possession.

On further questioning, the American couple revealed that they had bought the portrait - of a young boy in a polo-neck sweater - at a car boot sale in Scotland a while ago, and were keen to learn more about the subject of the painting.

So apparently a portrait of yours truly is hanging in the household of an entirely unrelated American couple, via a car boot sale in Scotland. As you might expect there are one or two missing links here, but I think I can be relatively sure of what has happened.

My nan and grandad have moved house a fair few times even in my lifetime (and many more times before that, my grandad having been in the RAF). Often they have moved house along with my aunt, hopping between such varied places as Brighton, Minehead, the Isle of Arran and even Spain.

This must have meant a good deal of packing, and a good deal of weeding out the things that didn't really need to travel each time. From what my mum and dad have told me about the polo-neck portrait, it was not of the finest order (unlike the other two, with which both parents seem to remain enamoured). It's therefore entirely plausible that between them, my grandparents and my aunt gave it the boot during one of their numerous house-moving phases.

The portrait may have had several homes before turning up at a car boot sale, but the Scottish location seems to suggest it bade farewell to my family when my grandparents left the Isle of Arran, back in the 1990s.

At some point since, our American couple have come over, visited a car boot sale, taken a shine to the portrait, bought it and hung it on the wall at home!

It's an extraordinary chain of events. Granted, somewhere in my wildest dreams there's probably something about portraits of me hanging up in homes worldwide, but I hadn't bargained on it quite yet. Maybe it'll turn up on the Antiques Roadshow before my days are out...