IT was possibly one of the most surreal moments I have ever experienced. As the years go by, I wonder if it is all a figment of an addled imagination. Or perhaps my mind has deliberately parked it somewhere out of harm’s way so as not to trouble my equilibrium.

But with the passing of Prince Philip, the memories have come tumbling back, all the way from July 2001.

That was the auspicious day when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh swung by Renfield Street in Glasgow to officially open the new offices which were – until last year – home to the Herald and Times newspapers.

There was much preparation in the days leading up to the event.

On the ground floor, where the Sunday Herald – then just an impish youngster – lived, we were warned to be on our best behaviour.

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The sniffer dogs turned up nothing more than a few mouldy bananas and a dead ham sandwich. They did, however, miss the cakes that were being displayed on top of computers in a show of republican protest. Some might have called it half-baked.

The royal entourage arrived. The Queen and her posse peeled off to the upper echelons of the building where the grown-ups resided at Herald and Times Towers.

So – we were getting Philip.

I was one of the Sunday Herald team press-ganged … sorry, selected … to meet the duke and we duly lined up in the conference room.

We had all scrubbed up not too badly and I even wore a frock. What could go wrong?

Quite a lot, it turned out.

The introductions were over and it was time for a few royal snaps, so we could record this momentous event for posterity.

One flash of the camera was all it took for proceedings to descend into farce.

Taking pride of place on our conference room wall was Big Mouth Billy Bass, a rubber fish who sang and gyrated and who was a popular novelty back on the noughties.

We thought we’d turned him off. Alas, the flash had triggered his sensor and off he went with his stonking rendition of Take Me To The River.

There was a moment of stunned silence broken only by Billy. Then a royal bodyguard leapt into action, wrestling Billy from the wall in mid verse, his fins still flapping rhythmically as he was escorted out of the conference room and despatched with in a bin. “Shoot it,” advised the duke, keen to put the poor, dumb animal out of its misery.

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I’d like to report that this was the perfect ice-breaker and things went swimmingly after that. But even after 20 years, it would be wrong to gloss over the facts.

The duke opened with an incisive line of questioning, asking how many trees we killed a week to produce the paper.

Our editor Andrew Jaspan, never one to be outflanked, countered with a question concerning the wellbeing of capercaillie on the Balmoral estate.

The rest is a clammy-palmed blur and even now I can feel a cold sweat rising on my spine as I recall that strange July day.

We never did see Billy the Bass again. Perhaps he was taken to the Tower.