Ramble Book is about parenthood, boarding school trauma, arguing with your partner, bad parties, confrontations on trains, friendship, wanting to fit in, growing up in the 80s, dead dads, teenage sexual anxiety, failed artistic endeavours, being a David Bowie fan; and how everything you read, watch and listen to as a child forms a part of the adult you become. Then one night in mid-November 2015, when I was watching TV with my wife, my phone rang. It was Dad calling from his bedroom. “Adam? Something extraordinary’s happened.” 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.” 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.

It’s an account of his life but constantly interrupted by nuggets of trivia, puns, and musings on films and music. 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.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.” He has always been “Mr Emotional”, as he puts it, whereas Cornish is more teasing, and at times on the radio you could hear Buxton’s hurt bafflement at his friend’s blunter comments. Buxton recalls that soon after they left school he asked Cornish if they’d still be friends in 10 years. “I don’t know, man, probably not,” he casually replied. Thirty years later, the comment burned enough for Buxton to put it in his book. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, King describes how the ancestors of one town greeted Confederate troops as heroes while another just 20 miles away viewed them as a scourge. Forks in the road are everywhere. 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. 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 They had become virtually estranged until Nigel was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, and Adam took him in during his last months. Because we spend so much time and effort making sure that the state of our being is what it ought to be, and it becomes very unsettling if you start suspecting that it doesn’t very much matter.”