Reading is one of life’s greatest pleasures, paging into new worlds, thoughts, and adventures of a fictional and real-life kind. After all, well before reality television and the Kardashians, books told us stories. Pages related the lives of the rich, famous and adventurous. Reading helps us through dark days, naughty days, teaching us lessons, shared experiences and well, so much more.
Billy Connolly does all of this in a single book. The Rambling Man is an autobiographical work that details many of his adventures around the world. From bungee jumping naked across New Zealand through to some of the most awfully sounding meals that he gladly sampled in some of the world’s far-flung places. He calls himself a Rambling Man, the kind of guy who’s never satisfied with just a picket fence. Adventure calls, and when it does, Connolly always answered.
In his foreword, Connolly wrote: “Being a Rambling Man was what I always wanted to be, to live the way I damn well pleased. I’ve met the weirdest and most wonderful people who walk the Earth, seen the most bizarre and the most fantastic sights — and I’ve rarely come across something I couldn’t get a laugh at. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad trip. Well, apart from in the 1970s, but that’s an entirely different story.”
And the book is full of stories and anecdotes. If you like storytelling, Connolly does it in an exceptionally tantalising manner. It reads like a television script, of sorts. His writing ability can take you from his work as a welder on the shipyards of Glasgow to biking along Route 66 in America in an instant. Tales of his initial ambition as a folk singer segues to how he was told that his humour sucked by some nosey non-fan. And of course, in true Billy Connolly style, how he often tells people to simply f**ck off.
What is particularly lovely about the book is the absolute humbleness of it, the blue-collar tinge with which he colours his anecdotes. There’s just nothing pretentious about this man and early in the book, he shares that he never thought that he was much good at anything. Yet, of course, from his role in the eighty’s sitcom Head of the Class through to independent and exceptional films like The Man Who Sued God, his fans know different.
Rambling Man shares how he travelled, always with his banjo in hand, to all the corners of the world, playing on ferries, under trees, at well known landmarks and in other people’s lounges. He shares how he’s roughed it, and continued to do so as a rambler, sleeping in bus stations and in open veld, on strangers’ floors and in tents. He shared how much he loves flying and relates some scary incidents and emergency landings while in the army; all while licking honey off his fingers.
It’s a joyful-spirited book that’s so refreshingly different from the self-love narcissistic biographies, autobiographies, and semblances of same that celebrities churn out as regularly as a high fire=be diet would do for your colon. Rambling men and women are different, he wrote, like him, somewhat of a hippie, somewhat of an adventurer. They love to play music, make art and tell stories along the way, he said. But above all, as Connolly points out on almost every page, they all share the love of the open road.
Desk jockeys, adventure fantasists and armchair rebels will love his tales of cause, of travel and the impact that the suffrage of others have had on his consciousness. The book is also incredibly funny, with his wee humour relatable in so many ways. Do not skip over his adventures in Canada with the Inuit and his rediscovery of the Northern Passage.
If there is one book to enjoy and read more than once, it’s Rambling Man. It reminds of another contemporary literary great, Douglas Adams’ non-fiction work called Last Chance to See. It’s that good, it’s that insightful, and it’s extremely entertaining.
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