I met Priscilla Presley this week – and couldn’t believe she was in the same building as me | Adrian Chiles

There’s no easy way to get from Priscilla Presley in Cardiff to watching your football team lose at Millwall. Logistically it was easy enough, by train and tube, but psychologically it felt like a bit of a stretch, somehow. Anyway, that was my Saturday. Funny old life. It just felt improbable that a woman who was once married to Elvis could be in the same building as me. But there she was, at BBC Wales, 80 now, small but strong, and I was shaking her hand and burbling heaven knows what old nonsense. I remember exactly where I was when I heard Elvis had died. I was 10 years old, in the back of my mum’s car, as she waited to get the fanbelt replaced. I’m not sure I’d even heard of Elvis, and I don’t think my mum had mentioned his name before or since, but I recall being in no doubt that something momentous had happened. I had the urge to tell Priscilla all this but that would have been ludicrous, so I didn’t. She was on the radio show to talk about her book, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis. I asked if she remembered her life before Elvis, but as she was only 14 when she met him, there was so little of it there to talk about. She spoke, apparently without rancour, of the heart-stopping anxiety she was made to feel about being married to – and trying to raise a child with – the world’s leading heart-throb. And in the blink of an eye I was walking from London Bridge to Millwall, stuck behind a posse of coked-up louts who were owning the pavement, scattering oncoming pedestrians, kicking the odd bin over, you know the kind of thing. Or perhaps you don’t, in which case keep it that way. These were my club’s morons, by the way, not Millwall’s. But I’m wary of their lot ever since one of them pretended to stab me about five years ago. Just for lols. He didn’t even have a knife in his hand. But it left a mark. And then we played like drains and lost 3-0. I was very glad I hadn’t thought to bring Priscilla along. She’s been through enough. • Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist