My Big Yin Story

There's a new exhibition featuring Billy Connolly's drawings and associated items from his five-decade long career as musician, comic, writer and actor opening next weekend in The People's Palace in Glasgow.
I wrote about it in today's Herald Scotland.
Can't wait to see the show as I'm a big fan. Have been ever since bring allowed to stay up late and watch him tell his infamous bum & bike joke on the Parkinson show in the 1970s.
My dad (Presbyterian minister) banned me and my brother from listening to cassettes of his live shows but we found a way to get round the ban...
I met The Big Yin*, as he is universally known, twenty or so years ago. I was with my friend Kate, who was up visiting from London.
We'd had dinner in a restaurant called Two Fat Ladies in the west end of Glasgow and on the way out we stopped to talk to a couple of newspaper colleagues.
Keith Bruce is now arts editor or The Herald and was largely responsible for letting me loose on writing about art for the paper (if I've never said thanks - I'm doing it now...)
The other journalist was called Sharon McCord and sadly she is no longer with us. Sharon was a talented writer who died way too young. Her 'pen name' was Sara Villiers.
As I remember it, Keith nudged me and whispered had I seen who was in the restaurant and, having had a few sherries, I exclaimed in a stage whisper: 'I want to write his biography!' (A Southbank Show all about Billy had recently aired and I was most taken with his life story...)
'Well now's the time to ask him," said Keith, egging me on.
So I did...
Billy was charm personified and said that he'd rather do it himself when the time felt right but thanked me for the offer.
We chatted for a bit and then, knowing he had a somewhat rocky relationship with journalists, we felt we had to own up that three out of the four of us were journalists.
I also owned up to having written a piece for a TV magazine just prior to the Southbank Show airing and had spoken to a few of his ex-shipyard colleagues.
He laughed it off and proceeded to treat us to what amounted to half an hour of vintage Connolly stand-up.
We all wandered out into the Glasgow night a little dazed and with a top-notch anecdote in our back-pockets.

* Other nicknames are available just in case any anonymous pedants on Twitter should be passing...