Book cover, a young Peel with his wife Sheila

This is the title of John Peel’s autobiography/biography.
(He had the first half written when he died and his wife, with help from his children, completed it after his death)
The lord knows why he decided to call it this but then John Peel’s attraction was always based on the fact that he was a maverick and an eccentric, a perpetual raver who managed to become an British institution without ever attaining respectability.
A breath of fresh air.
He first came into my life with the Perfumed Garden in the sixties, a late night miscellany of cutting edge music, poetry and Peel’s own ramblings.
He had the ability of appearing to talk to each listener one to one even when addressing millions.
The public mourning which greeted his death amazed the media in England last year.
On anecdote near the end of the book I think sums up his appeal.
John was in a pub when towering local with a “fearsome crew-cut” stood over him and said;
“You’re ma f****** hero, see when ah wis at school, nae c*** gave a f*** aboot me but ah used tae listen to yer show aw the time. F*****’ brilliant, big man!”
This speaks volumes for John’s communication skills.

Many things in the book made me laugh aloud.
I’m just going to give you two, if you buy the book yourself you’ll find the others.

When John was about four he crashed into a greenhouse in his tricycle and needed a fairly severe stitching up.
The was performed on the dining room table by the GP without benefit of an anaesthetic. John claims he was still too shocked to cry.
He then discovered that this lack of tears made him a local hero and he was spoken of as “The Boy Who Never Cried” .
He resolved never to cry again.
(This resolve must have served him well during his years in a particularly brutal public school)
Then he met his adored wife Sheila, (whom he always referred to as Pig)
“Since then” he says ” I have cried almost without cessation, at everything, from Little House on The Prairie to Liverpool’s triumph in Europe.”
His most successful crying effort was when he was re-living his Fathers return from the war for a television crew in the spot where he saw him return.
“As I told it I could feel something ungovernable rising within me and fancied that I would have some sort of a seizure at the completion of my account. In the event, I gave a rather theatrical moan and slumped to the ground in tears”

Another anecdote from his childhood which I loved was when his mother, never the most tactful of women, brought him into Browns of Chester to be measures for his first prep school suit
“She sought assurances in a booming voice, that clothing could be found that would adequately cover what she characterised as an excessively large backside”. he then “shrivelled to nothingness” as “the centre of Chester came to a standstill as other customers and members of staff craned to see the malformed body part and its unfortunate owner”

We had the benefit of a broadcaster without a peer while John Peel was with us.
I also feel that he would have made an excellent comic writer.