My Letter To The Organizers of the Cheltenam Literary Festival

Being in the public eye means that I occasionally have to bow to the wishes of the people in marketing and promote products. I received a helpful reminder from the people at the Cheltenham Festival and reproduce the details here along with my reply.

Richard Madeley
Sun 19 Oct

"TV presenter Richard Madeley explores how being a father has changed over the last four generations in his uniquely honest and touching book Fathers and Sons. He joins expert and author Frank Furedi to discuss the speed of change in family life and the challenges facing fathers today".

The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival 2008

10 - 19 October

With its signature blend of award winning writers, world-renowned thinkers and international star names The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival is a hotbed of debate and discussion with a unique regency style. In this year’s literary line-up Man Booker Prize winners rub shoulders with the finest classically trained actors, whilst top class comedians appear alongside leading political figures. With more than 450 writers and over 350 events this promises to be an exhilarating ten day celebration of the written word.

For more information visit http://cheltenhamfestivals.com

Or call the box office on 0844 576 7979

And my reply:

Dear Organizers of the Cheltenam Literary Festival,

It’s so good to hear from you again. I can’t believe that the moment is so nearly upon us. I’m honoured to be headlining your festival and the thought of standing up there on the world famous Pyramid Stage leaves me quivering with excitement. And if you would like me to hang around after the festival and help you milk your cows, you need only ask. I know my way around an udder and have been fully trained in teat management.

As you know, ‘Fathers and Sons’ has taken remarkably little time to write. One moment I was writing a comedy about the Cornish herring fleet and then, lo and behold, out pops an autobiography I knew nothing about! Once I'd borrowed the title from Turgenev, the thing was done. You might say that it happened overnight and I would be very grateful if you could snag me a complimentary copy. You probably know that my debut novel was cancelled a month before publication so this time I’m certainly doing my very best to advertise your festival. There will be no repeat. Dick Madeley will see print! Even as I speak, Judy is training her troop of midget Shetland ponies to perform an interpretive dance routine based around Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’, with Denise Robertson playing the corpse of Addie Bundren. I swear that there won’t be a dry eye in the house by the time I run out on stage wearing my spandex cycling shorts. I’m also delighted that Pam Ayres has now confirmed that she’s available for the duet.

Your news about Oddie does disappoint. He was recently boasting that he attends your festival every year and was there when Shirley Bassey read from her autobiography whilst wearing Wellington boots. It is, however, very gratifying to hear that his stand selling ornamental owl jewellery is so popular with the hippies.

I hope that you and yours are well and that the current dry weather hasn’t affected milk production. Both Judy and I feel that it’s so important that we support a festival in which lactation plays such a vital role.

Best wishes,

Dick Madeley.

PS. Is it too late to change the promotional literature to include some puff about my being the spiritual successor to Conrad, a modern Nabokov, and literary heir to P.G. Wodehouse? At the very least, can you mention that my wife plays bridge with Jilly Cooper?

PPS. I’ve just visited your website and I’m astonished to find that I’m not listed on the front page. Roger Moore is a saint, a real mensch, but has he or Ben Okri ever discussed a particularly painful vasectomy on live TV? I think not. Did all my swelling mean nothing to you?

PPPS. You wouldn’t do this to Clive James.

Viewing Martin Amis From Behind A Comedy Pimple

When Martin Amis appeared on stage, I cursed my luck. Virgin’s InterCity had got me to Manchester far too late. A dash from Piccadilly and I had arrived at the University five minutes before the debate was due to begin. So much for seat A2. I was forced to sit a dozen rows back and there was no chance that Martin would recognise me through my false nose and beret. It was the eternal dilemma of the celebrity in a non-celebrity guise: I’d be unable to reveal myself to my old friend and sparring partner for fear of causing a stampede of unpublished writers desperate to get into our Book Club. The situation was familiar yet still so frustrating.

I was in Manchester to work but I had arrived a day early to attend the Centre for New Writing’s Public Debate on the subject of ‘Literature & Belief’. I’d had barely made it. I was still out of breath when the porter of Whitworth Hall climbed up on stage and welcomed those of us packed beneath the gothic ceiling.

Balding and set heavy in the middle like an unexploded beer barrel, the porter had a broad Lancashire accent that fell over us like pint glasses down a coal chute.

‘I’d like to welcome you ladies and gentlemen to Whitworth Hall,’ he said, ‘but before we start the evening’s entertainment, I want to discuss a few matters of housekeeping...’ Which meant that he proceeded to locate the toilets and give us some helpful advice about escaping the building in the case of a fire. It amounted to him warning us that once all best-selling authors were out of the room, it would be every man for himself.

‘And so, with no more ado,’ he continued, ‘I want to thank you all for coming and I hope you enjoy the entertainment we’ve got lined up for you this evening...’

I had the strange feeling that a game of darts was about to begin and as I began to search the room for Peter Manley, I didn’t notice that Martin Amis had already walked up onto the stage.

As the room fell silent, I looked up and heard a loud sarcastic voice announce ‘game on, ladies and gentlemen, game on...’ The woman to my side elbowed me in my ribs. She told me to be quiet.

Amis always surprises me. He’s of slight build but his head is large as though it has rolled off some hill on Easter Island. Constructed in clay by a sculptor with big thumbs, he has an appearance that makes you suspect that God himself took a hand in creating this caricature of the perfect literary type. The lines of his face are strings of flesh held together by eyes that rarely engage the audience. His gestures are slow. His right hand hangs from his wrist as though it’s weighed down by an invisible cigarette. Most alarming is the way he wears his spectacles on a chain around his neck. There is something of the village shopkeeper about his manner. Touch my produce and you should really consider buying, he seems to be saying.

He was followed on stage by James Wood, who was actually the main reason I’d bought a ticket to the event. Wood’s recent book on ‘How Fiction Works’ is one of the best pieces of literary criticism I’ve ever read. Wood appeared less at ease in the surroundings. Balding, round featured, and with a gentle calm, he seemed much more amiable than Amis, that demonic tobacconist. When Amis brooded, Wood looked merely nervous, though his opinions were always confident. His right hand rarely moved from his chin and his body language was that of a man more at home in his study. He was still peering out from behind his books, throwing gems to an audience probably there for the man from Easter Island.

Yet as far as his prepared statements went, Wood had the more interesting things to say in the first half of the debate. He explained how he suspected that literature’s rise caused many of the doubts about Christianity at the end of the twentieth century. I agreed with him, to a point, though I think popular culture has had much more to do with it. Judy is far more significant that Zadie Smith, for example.

For me, the second half of the debate was edged by Amis who made some delightful allusions to two of my favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. After an hour, I was orgasmic with ideas and when it was time to open the debate up to questions from the floor, I was first to wave my hand. Unfortunately, I think my bright blue beret, false nose and comic pimple were not to the moderator’s liking. I clearly looked too sane. With hindsight, I should have been prepared for what followed. Somewhat naively, I thought that the people of Manchester would not waste the chance to ask five decent questions of two of the sharpest critics of literature in the last twenty five years.

How wrong I was...

The first question amounted to some confident fellow sporting a quality beard explaining how he felt dispirited that his faith was continually under attack from the likes of Richard Dawkins. It was only natural, I suppose, that from this he wanted to know: ‘could the two distinguished speakers tell me if they think I should write a book like Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” or something by C.S. Lewis?’

Amis gave him a look loaded with buckshot. ‘How dare you finger my quality shag tobacco!’ I thought he would reply.

‘I think you should ask a higher authority about that’ is what he did say.

It was a better answer than the question deserved. Unexpected too since I doubt if there are any higher authorities than Amis. Wood, however, was much more polite. ‘I think you should try to write allegory,’ he said and sounded like he meant it. But doesn’t that just mark the man? He probably catches moths and sets them down beside open windows before putting on some quiet cello music to help them on their way.

As I winched up my lower jaw after the sheer banality of the first question, the second was being asked from the front row and I had missed my chance to grab the radio microphone.

‘I have written a book,’ began a woman who I couldn’t see from where I sat but probably looked quite earnest, ‘and it is still unpublished...’

‘No surprise there,’ I muttered to the amusement of a few around me.

‘In my book...’ And here I have to ask you to insert some generic hokum. I really can’t remember much of the nonsense that came out but I think it might have involved elves. ‘But my question is... I recently had a dream in which I dreamt that that I was standing here asking you gentlemen on the stage if you could tell me what a perfect world would look like. So, could you tell me what a perfect world would look like?’

I forget what answer came from the stage. I had pretty much had enough of it by now. Two questions wasted and I was in no mood for stupidity. Unfortunately, nobody had told this to the person asking the third question.

‘I am the lost woman from the Book of Ezekiel!’ she said, her voice bellowing it out like a railway bomb alert. I zoned out pretty quickly and I noticed that neither Amis nor Wood wanted to answer the lost woman from the book of Ezekiel. I could see why she was lost and I felt pretty bad for Ezekiel.

The fourth question was the only decent question of the evening and related to Dickens. Both Wood and Amis answered it well and Martin did tell a nice anecdote about Greene that I hadn’t heard before. However, even as he was speaking, I knew that I must act. If I wanted to ask my question, I needed to wave like I’d never waved before. And this time I also gave a cough to attract the attention of the panel.

And it worked... to a degree. The moderator looked my way, smiled a thin evil smile and then pointed to a woman on the other side of the hall.

‘The last question, I’m afraid,’ said the man who I suspect has some vendetta against pimpled men in berets.

‘I think the panel don’t have a clue about postmodern Christianity...’ began the last interrogator. I wanted to shout ‘bollocks’ but I resigned myself to sighing loudly as I slowly sank down into my seat.

There was nothing for it. My ears ached as I listened to another question woefully inadequate for the quality of the brains up on the stage. Shortly after, the event broke up and I was left with my question about dogma, art and morality unasked. Amis and Wood were whisked off to wherever it is that a university fills their honoured guests with cheap wine and I was left to trudge the long way back to my hotel room. As I walked through the night, the glowing red sign of the Palace Hotel far behind me, I felt so terribly lonely. I suppose that’s why I rang Judy on my mobile.

‘Had a good evening?’ she asked. ‘Did you get to speak to James Wood? And how was Martin?’

‘They blanked me,’ I said as the Manchester rain began to fall. ‘They were off the stage before I could get James Wood to sign my book. I hate this city. The people here are mad! Do you know that, Judy? Absolutely mad!’

I turned up the steps of my hotel just off Princess Street. The view from my window was onto the Sackville Street car park that had been turned into a mini Thailand. ‘I’m not going to get a bit of sleep,’ I told her as I climbed the stairs. ‘The Ladyboys of Bangkok are playing in the car park across the road and all I can hear are the strange laments of men with large breasts and thick makeup.’

Judy fell silent. ‘Sometimes, Richard, I just wish you would tell me the truth instead of making up all these silly stories... You don't honestly expect me to believe that there are Ladyboys in the car park opposite your hotel?’

I was too tired to tell her that this was the absolute unadorned truth and that in order to understand the madness of Manchester, you really have to hear every dumb question, see every heavily corseted young adult male, and you really have to see life from behind a false nose and a comedy pimple.

The Blog Post In Which I Try To Pick A Fight With Will Self

In a duel between two of the better looking members of the ‘Grumpy Old Men’ cast, I think I'd have the advantage of my never having been a smoker. In fact, such is the clear superiority I’d have over the author of The Butt, which I recently added to my library, I would have more than enough opportunities to trap his wheezing body with the deadly Madeley earlobe manoeuvre inside three five-minute rounds. The fight would be over and I’d then have chance to confront an immobile Will Self about the terrible state of his penmanship.

That, at least, is the plan.

There is, in this, as much a note of confession as there is boastfulness. Confession because I’m quite aware that I lack Will’s relationship with words; his loquacity, the way he rumbles and tussles with synonyms, and the élan with which he executes any series of clauses over the course of a tightly writ contemporary satire. Yet I'm not ashamed to acknowledge that I have a clear advantage over the man when it comes to keeping the punters happy. I know, for example, how to sign my name. See:

The process that led me to make this startling realisation began on Friday morning when I found myself again cast out onto the streets of Manchester. An independent television producer with a mild Goebbels complex threw me from the ‘Eye of the Storm’ production offices because of the way I pronounce the word ‘mist’. Tearful, I dashed down to Deansgate and into Waterstone’s, where my slightly outlandish disguise of a beret and a false nose/moustache combination is sure to attract no ridicule. Half of the customers in the shop are celebrities seeking a little solitude and if nobody is going to recognise Bill Roache in a floral hat and woman’s taffeta gown, then I know I’m sure to be safe from the general public. It’s why I go there at least twice a week and rarely buy anything. I just loiter around the Henry Miller books where I console myself that – had I the money – I still wouldn’t go to the desk with a book covered with more modernist nipples than an Elberry post.

Yet Friday was no ordinary day. I had money from my birthday tucked into my sports girdle. In addition to which, I had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch, so I had a few extra coins in my pocket. I was in the mood and financial zone to buy a book. This is how I came to find myself deciding which of the editions of Will Self’s latest to grab. Was it to be the drab paperback made from recycled egg boxes or a hardback signed by the great man himself?

I chose the latter option but soon became disillusioned with the book once I’d settled myself in the coffee shop and set myself to reading it. I had a problem with how it was written. Not the story, I should add. I just mean the signature.


Swipe a pen across a sheet of paper dancing on a manic breeze and you might approximate the autograph I have in my book. The indifferent run of the pen lazily describes a shape that could be a ‘W’ but might also be some strange runic code involving white witches and duck tape. A few dots had been hammered after the scribble, but these too were without meaning. Where they the eyes of the author looking at me or nipples on a lounging figure? Has I turned away from Henry Miller only to still buy myself a reclining nude with literary pretensions?

Or was it that Will is so tired of signing these books that he no longer cares? Has the signed edition really become such a formality? A sham? A marketing exercise? Getting home late on Friday night, I retired to my room examine a few of the other signed editions I own. It didn’t take much searching to realise that Will is just not putting enough effort into his book signings. I have signed editions by Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Bennett, and David Mamet; all of whom were quite happy to exert their elbows when it came to signing my front pages.

Kurt Vonnegut's signature is a work of art as well as including a good partortion of his name, including at least a 'K', a 'V' and a 'T':



David Mamet's signature is almost readable on account of the two recognisable initials.


As for Alan Bennett, his signature is a work of precision to match his prose. Should a signature ever wear a herringbone tweed, this one would certainly have creases to match.


It begs the question: does Will Self know how to write his name so others might recognise it or is this lack of legibility caused by the rocking motion of the Waterstone’s gravy train? I suppose I’m surprised that the act of signing a book still involves a writer putting pen to frontispiece. Might we soon have to satisfy ourselves with the first edition ‘as breathed over by Will Self after a particularly spicy meal’? Might the tang of chicken korma curry be enough to prove that the book has been in the author’s presence? Get the man to urinate on a pile of hardbacks from a great height and I would consider that his mark has been made. Let Waterstone’s print stickers for the cover that read: ‘As Sprayed On By The Author’ and I’ll pay a premium price for a book by the man who best captures the zeitgeist, the throb of the nation’s pulse. He has words coming out of places where most men grow hair. I just wish he weren’t so incapable of signing his name legibly.

Will: I’m calling you out. I demand that you post me a legibly signed copy of your book or I’m coming for you. And I warn you that my deadly earlobe manoeuvre has crippled many a healthy man.

The Touch of Nepotism

An old farmer friend of mine, who shall remain nameless other than to say he’s big in diary cows, rang me on the landline late last night. He caught me with a Cadbury’s chocolate finger stuck up one nostril as I tried to bite off its other end without using my hands. You might call my behaviour ‘odd’ but these are the challenges I sometimes set myself just to keep myself sane.

‘Madeley?’ I said, stuffing the remaining finger into my mouth.

‘Richard,’ said my farmer friend, ’I need a big favour.’

I sank back into my chair but not before taking the 500 page manuscript from the desk and putting it on the floor. As I set it down, it struck me, not for the first time, that the title, ‘Fry, Oddie, & Me’ sounds pretty convincing as a collection of my shorter essays and shorter writings, mainly culled from this blog. My agent has been onto me for weeks to get it printed out so she can begin hawking it around the bigger London publishers and procure me a bit of loose shilling for my pocket that had become increasingly prone to muttering to itself and sitting lonely in the corner.

‘Fire away, Desmond,’ I said, though Desmond is not his real name. ‘You know I owe you plenty of favours. What is it now? Want me to come and help you like last time and rub butter into your cows’ udders?’

‘No, no,’ said Demond. ‘Nothing like that. It’s to do with my youngest, Samantha. She’s just turned twenty three.’

‘You want me to come and rub butter into her udders then?’ I asked as I wiped chocolate from my nose.

I don’t think Desmond was too impressed with the light way I verbally fondled his daughter. However, he was obviously trying to keep on the good side of me and let my comment slip by like a well margarined teat.

‘Sam’s always wanted to get into journalism,’ he began. ‘She’s done her qualifications. Got her 2.2 from the University of Luton and she now fancies working for one of the big broadsheets. You know… Like The Guardian, or The Times. To be honest, Dick, if it came down to it she’d probably give The Telegraph a try. But that’s just it. I was wondering if you could pull a few strings and get her an “in”.’

‘An in?’ I repeated. ‘I don’t know what an “in” would look like. If I did have an “‘in”, I’d used the “in” myself to get myself “in”. I’m more prolific than Clarkson and with more opinions that Gill. I’m perfectly placed to attract a huge readership but even I can’t get in the front door.’

He sounded disappointed. ‘You can’t tell me that you haven’t got some strings you could pull. She’s pretty good at writing. Spells well, good punctuation, the lot. And she has a lively mind. Not the other day she noticed have few black umbrellas there are in the world. How observant is that?’

‘It’s clearly Pulitzer material,’ I agreed, ‘but print journalism is not a business for familiar favours. You don’t get into print just because you’re the son or daughter of an established name. You have to learn your craft by spending years if not decades working in local newspapers. Tell your daughter to start out at the bottom and by the time she’s fifty, she might earn her chance to flex her writing muscles with the big boys.’

You can tell when a chap’s disappointed but doesn’t want to show it. It’s all in the verbal ticks he displays when finding a reason to get off the line.

‘Oh, well, if that’s the way it is, mate,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why I bothered asking… Thanks for nothing.’

After I hung up, I surprised myself to discover that a pretty rotten mood had made itself at home in the room. Putting a flea into a fellow’s ear is not the Madeley way. Not when he considers the fellow a good friend. However the assumption that some people have about me just rubs me up the wrong way. Just because I’m famous, it doesn’t mean that I should be obliged to do every rum Harry a favour. Doors that are closed to me shouldn’t be opened for others just because I say so. Might as well hang a bloody sign around my neck reading: ‘“A” list media careers here, form an orderly queue at my right elbow’.

Anyway, I turned off the light to my office, with one small smile directed towards my finished manuscript, and I hopped it up the stairs towards warm bed and an even warmer Judy.

The warmer Judy was already sitting up in the warm bed, a notebook on her lap.

‘Shopping list?’ I asked as I dropped my trousers.

‘Synopsis,’ she replied.

‘For the shopping list? Surely it’s not that long, even for a New Year order.’

‘For my novel,’ she said.

I tried to give her one of my dignified stares. Hard to do when you’re standing in the middle of the room with your trousers around your ankles. However, I think I did a fine job of it. She seemed to shrink in the bed and pull the notebook towards her.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she snapped. ‘You’re just angry because you can’t get anybody to read your stuff.’

‘It is not stuff,’ I told her. ‘It’s clever social commentary disguised as lightweight comedy. Besides, what makes you think you’ll be any different?’

‘Of come on, Richard,’ she laughed. ‘We haven’t been running the country’s biggest book club without knowing something about books. I’ve already got a plot and plenty of characters. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to sit down at the computer and write my first chapter. How difficult can it be?’

I stepped out of my trousers and picked them up. A snap of the wrists and they were folded and draped over the back of the chair and I set to unbuttoning my shirt.

‘Give me the outline,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what you have.’

She cleared her throat and looked at her pad.

‘Justine Pontleby is the 22 year old daughter of well known celebrity chef Gordon Pontleby. Trading on her father’s fame, she lands a top job in the world of afternoon TV.’

‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘Could never happen. A young sniff of a girl like that would never get a break in TV. She’d have to work years in regional TV or radio before she’d even get a chance of the big time.’

Judy just peered over her half-glasses before she continued.

‘She meets debonair Richard Smiley, a charming if slightly psychotic host of a popular TV talk show. Smiley has dark secrets involving an addiction to sniffing Toilet Duck. When he is involved in the accidental maiming of the show’s weatherwoman, Justine is forced to help cover up the crime…’

I shook my head as my shirt fell away. Just before it hit the floor, I flicked my leg and the shirt came flying back over my head. I caught it and folded it in a single move before I turned my attention to my socks.

‘The thing is, Judy,’ I said as I bounced on the edge of the bed. ‘You have a plot but it’s unbelievable. A man as crazy as this Smiley character would never get his own show.’

‘He hosts it with his sister,’ said Judy.

‘Again, that’s very unlikely,’ I replied as I rolled up my socks and threw them on the chair.

Down to my underpants, I jumped up and strode out to the mirror to run through my five minute Tai Chi exercise I do before bed every night. I like to be centred before I sleep.

‘Don’t you want to hear the rest?’ asked Judy as I began to fight imaginary foes in slow motion.

‘To be honest, Judy, I don’t. It seems to be yet another of these unbelievable stories about the corrupt world of the London based media. I just wish you could tell it how it really is, with the honourable people who work long hours on quality programming before returning home at night feeling totally rewarded with their lives. Instead, I suppose it will be nothing but tales of sex, drugs, and stale bread rolls in the Green Room.’

She closed her notes.

‘I already have an agent who is interested in representing me,’ she said.

I was in the deep squat of the tiger stance as she said this. I felt my muscles tighten. ‘An agent?’

‘Felicity R––,’ she replied.

I looked at her blankly.

‘You know. She’s the daughter of old Reggie.’

‘Little Felicity? She’s a literary agent now?’

‘Oh, come on Richard. Don’t tell me you don’t remember Reggie asking us to put a word in.’

‘Did he?’

‘He did.’

‘I don’t remember putting any words in anywhere,’ I replied, feeling so small squatting there in my red and yellow underpants.

‘Of course you didn’t. But I did.’

‘You did?’ I stood up and heard a bone in my back go acoustic. ‘You can do that? You can put words in?’

Judy stretched a hand towards the light. ‘Not for anybody,’ she said with a smile. The room went dark. ‘Goodnight Richard.’

Richard & Judy's Christmas Books 2007

I just want to take a moment and mention our show, this coming Saturday. It’s a one-off special for the festive season, when Judy and I will be presenting what we like to think of as our ‘gift guide’ to the best Christmas books.

We’ve put all our favourites into four categories which include celebrity autobiographies, stocking fillers, coffee table books and cookery books. Even better, in the studio we’ll have Ronnie Wood, Sharon Osbourne, Russell Brand and Helen Mirren who'll be choosing which of our nominations make it to the final selection.

I'm really quite excited since neither Judy nor I know which books our guests have selected. I’ve already filmed the segments for all my choices but you’ll have to tune in to see which of the following our panel chose for the final end of year book list.

Richard's List of His Best Christmas Books 2007

Bill Oddie’s Little Black Bird Book by Bill Oddie

Gonzo by Hunter S. Thompson

The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry

Erewhon by Samuel Butler

The English by Jeremy Paxman

Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years 1969-1979 by Michael Palin

House of Meetings by Martin Amis

And It's Goodnight from Him ...: The Autobiography of the Two Ronnies by Ronnie Corbett

Life at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse

Beyond Good and Evil by by Friedrich Nietzsche

In Tandem With Bryson

Last week I attended at a charity cycle ride around Durham, accompanied on my tandem by the simply adorable Bill Bryson.

Bill agreed to step in at the last minute when Judy fell foul of her troublesome knee which, you all know, has never been right since she ran the London marathon back in 1987. You might say it was a bit of a blessing. Judy can be too competitive at times, whereas Bill was happy to coast merrily along. He’s also a laugh a minute, though this did lead to a few dicey moments when he took his eye off the road. But even when the brakes failed and we were heading for a ditch, Bill still managed to retain his whimsy. ‘There’s nothing like an English hedgerow,’ he said as we weaved between traffic and sped uncontrollable down the hill. ‘It prevents serious accidents as though God himself had planted cushion bushes down every English by-lane’.

A minute later, Bill was picking leaves from his beard while I took a look at the brakes. It’s then that I discovered that somebody had tampered with the locking nut. Bill thought it was just bad luck but I’d earlier eyeballed Des Lynam hanging around the bike racks with a spanner. I told Bill that I wouldn’t stand for it.

‘Nobody tampers with my nuts,’ I said.

But Bill, being Bill, soon managed to calm me down.

‘What would England be if it weren’t for slightly eccentric TV presenters with a compulsion to do evil?’ he asked and I had to admit that he had a point. ‘Come on, Dick,’ he said, patting my on my back. ‘We’ll go and have a pint of cider in a lovely old-fashioned pub and I’ll tell you some stories about my hilarious adventures with Cornish tin miners.’

Which is precisely what I did and why I’ve been hung over for the last week.

So, now I’m back, and how about some bumper Bill Bryson facts? Did you know that Bill is the country’s most popular author, having sold three books to every man, woman, and child? Such is Bill’s success, he’s being held responsible for a forest the size of Glasgow disappearing every day but, to counter this, he personally plants nearly a thousand new trees each week at his own private oak forest outside Birmingham. It there, on weekends, that he dresses in nothing but Loxley green and likes to be called Robin. Less well know is that fact that Bill has the biggest collection of beard-related literature in the world. He also collects vintage wirelesses on which he listens to broadcasts of old 1950s radio. And did you also know that Bill never flies to homeland of America. He works his voyage on merchant ships being a fully trained coxswain and able to hold his breath under water for several minutes.