As a “wee boy”, the Scottish comedian was cast adrift. Now, at 80 and struggling with Parkinson’s, he contemplates the final journey to come.
In familiar surroundings Billy Connolly has always felt like a stranger. “The one thing that made me feel less of an outsider was to be alone on the road,” the 80-year-old comedian, actor, writer and musician writes in his latest book,Connolly was born into a working-class family in 1942, in Glasgow. The tenement building in Dover Street where he was raised was cramped and claustrophobic. From an early age “I’d leave the house and just start walking”, he recalls.
The book begins with a definition of a rambling man. The term applies to men and women, Connolly stresses. Typically, it’s somebody who travels for philosophical rather than economic reasons, often seeking out fellow travellers on a similar journey. As he writes: “They usually have a deep and painful sense that they don’t belong. They’re in a place where they don’t fit, so they wander off.”
There was “Willie Bennet”, who sold crockery and cutlery off the back of a truck at the Barras market in the centre of town. “I loved him. He was funny about his wares, and about the people who bought his stuff,” Connolly remembers. “He had no real interest in a person’s religion, but he gave away green and blue ballpoint pens, and he’d say: ‘A greenian for a Fenian and bluians for blue noses ’.” Glasgow was a tribal and fiercely partisan city.
In 2013, Connolly was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease; he retired from live performing five years ago. These days he shakes so much he can sit in the living room with his eyes closed and pretend he is rattling along on a freight train.“You have to surrender to the disease and deal with it,” he says. “I find that I now walk differently, and my feet move differently, and I have got a different kind of balance.
His wife, former comedian, psychotherapist and writer Pamela Stephenson, who was born in New Zealand but grew up in Sydney, is now his full-time carer.in 1979. He was then married to interior designer Iris Pressagh, with whom he had two children, Jamie and Cara. Connolly and Stephenson married in 1989 and have three children, Daisy, Amy and Scarlett.“When I met Pamela I realised that I hadn’t conducted my life too brightly and it was a chance to start again,” he says.
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