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

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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. 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.

My chest elevator dropped a few floors. I had been so focused on Dad’s physical deterioration, I hadn’t considered what might be happening to his mind. Thing is, you’re unlikely to strike up a heart-to-heart chat with your son for the first time while he’s standing over you until you’ve finished your smoothie, getting annoyed when you don’t take your pills or hoisting your nappy on before bed. Also you’re more or less deaf. And you’ve got cancer. In the end we were just two uptight men who found it easier to be on our own. 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.”

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Yes,” replied Pa softly before continuing, as if to himself, “Occasionally, I feel that I’m absolutely irrelevant.” 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. While Buxton and Cornish have both found success individually, for a certain kind of fan (me), the real joy comes from listening to them talk to one another, as on their former XFM and 6 Music shows. They have the kind of joyful, natural conversational style that only comes from a 40-year friendship between two people on the same wavelength. They started making films together when they were teenagers – including my personal favourite, one of Buxton, Cornish and Theroux dancing to Groove Is In The Heart when they were about 20. At the age of 17, after a childhood in a foster family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given his birth certificate. He learns that his real name was not Norman. It was Lemn Sissay. He was British and Ethiopian. And he finds out that his mother has been pleading for his safe return to her ever since his birth.

It’s an approach that listeners love: each new episode of the podcast will get around 200,000 listens upon release, then climb from there: some of the most popular episodes are now in the millions. His favourite guests are those who are “up for blathering and friendly”. He’s less keen on musicians. “The more technically gifted a musician, the less likely it seems that they are to be able to express themselves via speech.” Recently I watched an Adam and Joe show on the 4Player and was surprised that his dad appeared on the show. I mean, his dad must have been alright to have been willing to be on his son’s comedy TV show playing a posh, grumpy old man doing unlikely things for the audience’s amusement. You were an early adopter of podcasting. Do you get fed up with all these Johnny-come-lately copycats? 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.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. Plus, there are clear benefits to being able to relive the past. Buxton always knew his father was baffled by his interests – that was the whole joke of BaaadDad. Recently, he has been watching old outtakes from The Adam And Joe Show. “We shot absolute hours of stuff with my dad, making him go to places that he hated, and he was always game. It was heroic. I used to think, ‘Why isn’t he more proud of me?’ But he was proud. I can see that now.” Over in the flat I found him sitting up in bed looking worried. “It’s the strangest thing,” he said, all the hardness gone out of his voice. “I woke up and I no longer had any sense of who I am.” I fetched a family photo album and found that he was able to recognise and identify everyone in it, so the problem wasn’t with his memory. Instead, it was his sense of self that had short-circuited. I didn’t like to see him vulnerable. On the other hand, it was preferable to seeing him crotchety and impatient They had a more upbeat conversation on standby in case the episode was too “dreary”, but in the end Buxton broadcast the original and was inundated with messages from listeners. “I was very glad,” he says quietly. “That was that thing I always really wanted… a group of people who really get where I’m at.” King recalls an earlier time in a Buddhist monastery. Warned that surrounding scenery would detract from solitude and commitment, he nevertheless succumbed. King is nothing if not curious.

You describe yourself as “a chronic over-thinker”. Have you become even more introspective this past year? A work that feels spontaneous and fresh... The triumph of the book is Buxton's account of his relationship with his father. The ways in which Adam's expectations of an emotional reconciliation fail to match reality make for some beautifully tragi-comic scenes.' - The Daily Express Jan Morris was born James Humphry Morris in Somerset in 1926, and died in Wales in 2020. She underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1972, after travelling to Morocco for the procedure. Two years later, she wrote Conundrum, in which she told the story of her transition. It was re-released in 2018.Nigel Buxton is portrayed as an irascible but lovable figure during Adam’s childhood, who becomes more irascible and less lovable as the years go by. Is there really a rivalry there? “When I joke, there’s always a grain of truth to it. But it’s so unimportant. I definitely had a long phase with Joe when I really did feel threatened and felt like people saw me as the failure. I thought, ‘Oh NO, I’m [the Fifth Beatle] Pete Best!’ But then I got over it. I’m sure it pops up, it’s bound to pop up, isn’t it?” 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.

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.

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I ask, finally, what his father would have made of Ramble Book. “He would have thought it was, as he said about many of my efforts, pretty rubbishy.” He is still not sure whether he should have been so honest; it was certainly not his father’s way. “He thought that, if you just keep that upper lip stiff, then you’ll be surprised by how much you can cope with. There’s some truth to that but what won out for me was a sense that it is valuable to talk about difficult things,” says Buxton. “I’d rather be talking than not.” Lea Ypi is professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, but she grew up in Albania during the years of communist rule. Her grandfather had been prime minister for just over a year in the early 1920s, and was assassinated in December 1940. Those facts – and the detrimental impact the family’s association with the former prime minister would have – were kept from her during her childhood.