Ramble Book: Musings on Childhood, Friendship, Family and 80s Pop Culture

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Morris was far from alone in her conviction that she’d been born into the wrong body, but Britain was not a society in which she was free to undertake the necessary transition on her own terms and, “for forty years… a sexual purpose dominated, distracted and tormented my life: the tragic and irrational ambition, instinctively formulated but deliberately pursued, to escape from maleness into womanhood… each year my longing to live as a woman grew more urgent, as my male body seemed to grow harder around me”. After close to 200 episodes, he left to pursue other interests, and eventually found himself elected to the European Parliament, representing the seat of West Midlands. He was a spokesperson on human rights and, before his time in Brussels drew to a close in 2014, he’d been awarded a CBE for public and political service. Returning to Britain wasn’t the end of his political career, nor of his campaigning, and he took his seat in the House of Lords as a life peer.

In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, King stops at the home of James Buchanan, the bachelor president from 1857 to 1861, who sympathized with the south and loathed abolition. Ending slavery could wait. Of the supreme court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, Buchanan highly approved. Well, it doesn’t much matter. But that’s why we make things and organise things, isn’t it? Otherwise, of course it’s all meaningless.” Mirror Book Club members have chosen My Name Is Why by Lemn Sissay as the latest book of the month. He plays me – with delight – a new jingle he’s been working on. It’s about Covid-19 and contains the lyric “I have to wear a mask because IIIIIII am toxic/ Terrible things are spilling out of me…” When he played it to his eldest son, Natty, he told him it could be funnier. “And I had to resist the temptation to say, ‘You don’t know anything! Play me some of your funny jingles, 18-year-old!’ I didn’t say that, I just said, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right…’”Where an autobiography has been written by an actor or other public performer, it’s not uncommon for them to also narrate the audiobook. This is true of Adam Buxton with Ramble Book, Michael Cashman with One of Them, Miriam Margolyes with This Much is True, and Stephen Fry with his various volumes of autobiography, including The Fry Chronicles, More Fool Me and Moab Is My Washpot. Hearing the author’s words in their own voice brings another dimension to the work, and lets you take them with you wherever you’re going, whatever you’re doing. The nutritionist also arranged for a regular supply of smoothie supplement drinks and stressed the importance of consuming at least one a day. They came in a wide range of foul flavours and only ever acted on Dad as a powerful emetic. Between the smoothies and the cheese, one of us was gagging most of the time. It’s an account of his life but constantly interrupted by nuggets of trivia, puns, and musings on films and music. The result is an intensely moving conversation between two pals, by turns silly and tearful, with Cornish mildly guiding Buxton to talk through his grief (“But hey, how are you doing, man? What’s the weather like in your head?”). “That was never really the basis of our relationship,” says Buxton. “Joe’s not someone who rings up for a long, deep conversation. He’s someone who’s probably closer to my mum’s way of thinking – ‘Come on, man. Don’t waste time doing all this introspection, just get on with it.’ I thought it might be a good antidote to how I was feeling, which was very caught up in it and isolated.” I certainly cried as I was writing. I regretted things, felt ashamed, thought of things I should have said. I’m not sure how useful some of that wallowing was, but overall it did me good. It also encouraged me to find out a lot more about my parents. We never talked about emotional stuff, about their pasts or families. So it was fascinating digging into all that.

And hurrah for this book. An amazing project that must have added several grey hairs to the skulls of all concerned. Galactic Ramble a fascinating book and, unlike some reference publications, one that, I very much fear, I’ll have to read from cover to cover. See you in a year or two then. A few weeks ago, he started therapy for the first time. “I felt like, ok, I don’t think I’m coping very well with this and I’m a bit worried that I’m spiralling into areas that are just making me unhappy and that’s no good.’ I don’t mind for myself so much, but my children are young and I don’t want their teenage years to be full of memories of me just being a misery.”Imagining George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, he delivers a lesson on how such rivers came to be named. Names affixed to bodies of water by Indigenous peoples gave way to Dutch pronunciation, then anglicization. The Delaware, however, derived its moniker from Lord De La Warr, a “dubious aristocrat” otherwise known as Thomas West. When I heard Adam Buxton had written a book, I was really keen to read it. I still remember the night I discovered the anarchic joy that was The Adam and Joe Show, a comedy that still fills me with fond memories of my student days and early married life. Also in Lancaster, King visits a townhouse once owned by Thaddeus Stevens, the 19th-century Republican congressman and radical abolitionist. At the start of the civil war, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, viewed the conflict as the vehicle for preserving the Union. He opposed slavery but opposed secession more. For Stevens, slavery was an evil that demanded eradication.

Morris is best known as a travel writer, and that career took her to Everest with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, to Fiji, to Suez during the crisis and, memorably, to Italy. Her work on Venice is of particular note. But Conundrum is something else entirely. It’s an internal journey – a journey home in many respects – that sets out its stall at the very beginning. Joe always makes me laugh until I wheeze. Sometimes you get intelligent, interesting people who are good at talking – Romesh Ranganathan or Kathy Burke spring to mind – so you just have to turn the thing on and listen to them. I feel a strong temptation to lie and list some that make me look more intelligent. But if I’m honest, I love Athletico Mince, Richard Herring, The Horne Section and a Canadian one called Stop Podcasting Yourself. The hosts remind me of a Canadian me and Joe. A funny, self deprecating and moving autobiography that switches between Adam’s time caring for his elderly father and his pop culture saturated childhood in the 80s. The most emotionally effective parts (for me) were about Adam’s relationship with his father, Nigel, who is as rigid, conservative and snobbish as he is earnest and eloquent - trying to give his children a secure future the best way he knows. Father-son difficulties seem to be a common autobiographical thread (at least in works I’ve been reading e.g. Karl Ove Knausgaard) but in this case Adam managed to convey both the flaws and endearing qualities of a difficult father.The confluence of the Delaware River and Neshaminy Creek, in Croydon, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Jana Shea/Alamy I find it a bit hard to get my head around the fact that Adam is now fifty years old, much as I struggle to get my head around the fact that I'm now forty-six, but hey, it happens to us all, I suppose. Writing a book seems a natural thing to do at the time Adam has reached in his life. He's now married with three kids, and the death of his father (the legendary BaaaaadDad) in 2015 provoked some reflection on his life. This book is the result, and it turned out to be a wonderful read. We are talking in the flat attached to Buxton’s recording studio, which is filled with his father’s furniture. Nigel died in 2015, several months after he came to live with Buxton and his family. Something of a hoarder, his oldest son, who “definitely shares that tendency”, can’t bear to throw away his father’s things. So, on a lovely summer’s day, the two of us sit in what is undeniably an old person’s flat, my feet on a needlepoint footrest. Behind Buxton is a bookcase filled with his father’s books. All around us are photos of Nigel. “I thought, well, this could be a cool place for my children to hang out,” he says, but then adds, “I’m worried it’s slightly mad that I’m building this weird museum in here.”

I was three or perhaps four years old when I realised that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl,” she writes. “I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” What follows is a highly evocative sentence, that hints at the beauty of the writing to come: “I was sitting beneath my mother’s piano, and her music was falling around me like cataracts, enclosing me as in a cave.” Soon after, we met with the local GP and it was agreed that there was little to be gained from any aggressive treatment for his cancer. The GP explained that if he took his various pills when he was supposed to, Dad was unlikely to be in any pain and the main challenge would be keeping his energy levels up. To that end, a nutritionist at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital encouraged him to load up on noodles, butter, cheese and other foods that for most people might be considered naughty. We went and sat in the living room. I made some tea and set it down for Dad with a couple of milk chocolate Hobnobs, hoping to refocus his mind on a simple pleasure. “Have you ever dunked a biscuit?” I asked, prepared for him to tell me that dunking biscuits was vulgar, barbaric or grotesque. It’s a story that will thankfully be unfamiliar to a large part of its audience. For a white reader with no experience of the political system under which he came into the world, it’s difficult to comprehend Noah’s need to remain hidden and so often confined to the house. Apartheid came to an end when Noah was still a child, but even in the wake of that momentous event the fall out was unequal and extreme. Has his father’s obsession with money rubbed off on him? “No, the reverse is probably true: I don’t think about money enough. I’ve never really wanted to be rich, that’s never, ever been a motivating factor for me at all. I felt sorry for my dad and although I was very grateful to him for the sacrifices he made, which meant I met so many people that were important to me. I resent… I thought he gave up too much. And I would rather have had him around. I mean, I think I would? Maybe I wouldn’t have got a book out of it.”

Discover the back stories of some of the best-known names in showbiz and politics, in their own words

That’s an interesting question. Would he be super-woke or would he be appearing on Dave Rubin’s YouTube show? Would he and Jordan Peterson be bemoaning the excesses of cancel culture? Possibly. Bowie did a few cancellable things in his life. But I do miss him. When I go on stage my script is a safety net. With writing a book, there’s nothing: you’re tortured by the possibilities It’d be good for Rosie to sit down and have an honest chat with the local muntjac deer. Just so they can air their grievances and explain what it’s like being terrorised by a yappy little poodle-cross. With its rugged fells, softly flowing streams, glittering tarns and wide open lakes, the Lake District is England’s most popular National Park. Covering 2,362 square kilometres of protected land, it’s still easy to find an isolated felltop to breathe in the fresh Cumbrian air and escape modern life here.” Today, as the host of The Daily Show, Noah has been named as one of the most powerful people in New York media. To have reached such heights after so difficult a start in life makes this story all the more remarkable. They had become virtually estranged until Nigel was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, and Adam took him in during his last months.