BACK in the 1970s, John Lennon met some aliens. Those aliens gave him a little brass egg. He gave that little brass egg to Uri Geller, who has kept it ever since. In his living room.

Come again? “I believe it,” says Geller, who has allowed the egg to go on show as part of a John Lennon shrine at the flagship Virgin Megastore in London. “John said he had been lying in bed, when a bright sphere of light appeared in one corner of his room. An alien hand came out of it, and gave him the egg. And he gave it to me. And he wasn’t even drunk. I asked.”

Geller, born in Israel, has just been abroad. He hugged a Palestinian and shook hands with a Syrian ambassador. “Call it coincidence if you like,” he says, “but John loved peace.”