I’M LAUGHING AT MY PARKINSON’S Pages 32 & 33

Astonishingly, he learnt he had it the SAME DAY he was told he had prostate cancer. But in an unflinching new book, the much-loved comic responds with typical black humour...

WHEN I was knighted last year at Buckingham Palace, I didn’t really cover myself in glory. At one time I’d have hated the very idea of it – the hippy Billy Connolly would have thought it was all nonsense. But I’ve mellowed as I’ve got older and to turn it down would have been churlish. Still, when Prince William asked me a few questions I was very nervous, and what with that and the Parkinson’s disease I was diagnosed with in 2012, my mouth stopped working at the most inopportune moment. I flubbered and I bejabbered. The Prince asked me something – f*** knows what it was – and I said: ‘Flabgerbelbarbeghghghgh.’

Honestly, he must think I’m a complete simpleton. I’d love to meet him again to apologise, and to show him I’m not a total idiot. PARKINSON’S disease dominates my life to quite a large degree nowadays. The diagnosis came as quite a shock, and I found out about it in the strangest way.

I was staying in a hotel in Los Angeles and had been coming in and out of the lobby. There was an Australian dance team staying there, and the guy in charge of them came over to me and said: ‘Billy, I’m a fan of yours and I’m a doctor.

‘I’ve been watching you walking in and out of here and you have a strange gait. I think you have got early onset Parkinson’s disease. You need to go and see your doctor.’

When I got back home, my doctor did blood tests and various other little bits and pieces, and he told me that I had it: the guy in LA had been right. That diagnosis didn’t come during the best of weeks for me. I’d also been told that I had gone deaf and that I had prostate cancer. The doctor who broke the prostate news to me – on the same day that I got told about the Parkinson’s – said: ‘First of all, you’re not going to die.’ I was shocked, and said: ‘Of course I’m not going to f ****** die!’ It never crossed my mind.

Those other two ailments are gone now. I have got wee hearing aids and I had successful surgery to remove my prostate – it was in and out, done, as simple as that.

THE thing that I find hardest about my Parkinson’s is coming to grips with the fact that it’s never going to go away. Everything that has ever been wrong with me in the past always went away, eventually. It was either operated on or it cured itself. This isn’t going anywhere: in fact, it’s going to get worse. My medication controls it for now, but in the very early days after I was first diagnosed, they took me off it because the doctors reckoned the side effects were stronger than the positive effects. I asked them: ‘What are the side effects?’ They told me: ‘An overriding interest in sex and gambling.’ So, if you see somebody in Las Vegas with an erection, he’s probably got Parkinson’s. I have talked to other people who have it. The actor Ian Holm, who I was in the Hobbit film with, advised me that when my hand starts to shake too much, I should put it into my pocket. I replied: ‘But what if I put it into my trouser pocket and I happen to be in an art gallery at the time, innocently examining the female nudes?’

Robin Williams and I used to talk about Parkinson’s a lot. He would call me and we would compare notes and symptoms. Robin worried about it a lot. He got quite luvvie towards the end, and the last time that he phoned me, before he died, he told me that he loved me. I said that I loved him, too, and he said: ‘No, I love you like a brother – do you realise that?’ I told him that I did, because I did.

I’ve learned to live with the disease. I get up every morning and do my exercises. I take my medication, I’ve learned to take it easier and to look out for when the shaking starts (it’s always my left hand). I try everything that might help. I get massages and messed around generally. I find it helps me and then that lasts a little while. But then I get worse again as the disease creeps merrily forward. It seems relentless.

Researchers are making progress on curing Parkinson’s but it seems to be well away in the distance.

They identified some drug users, who had damage very similar to Parkinson’s, and cured them by taking cells from aborted human foetuses and injecting them into their brains. I’ve spoken to guys working on it at Harvard. Now the process has to be refined and another source of cells found, so in the end it will be possible to treat millions of patients using cells produced in the lab.

I’ve told them I’ll be a guinea pig for them. I think they are going to take me up on that.

I don’t know what the future holds but in any case, my doctor said I’d live until I was 90, which is 15 years away. I wasn’t expecting to live that long before I got Parkinson’s. I know I’m lucky.

When I worked in the Clyde shipyards as a boy, men would be presented with a ‘wallet of notes’ when they retired – a cheap wallet containing money we’d collected for them.

A manager would make a speech and say: ‘Well, Willy, I suppose you’ll be going to potter around your garden now!’ and we would all laugh, because we’d know Willy lived in a high-rise. A shipyard worker usually lasted 18 months after he retired before he died.

My problem, such as it is, is that I sometimes have trouble getting out of chairs. When I go into a restaurant, I have to look around and work out where to sit and choose somewhere that it won’t take me a long time to get up from.

I ask the waiter: ‘When I have finished eating, will you help me?’ They always say yes.

People in general are very nice to me and keep telling me that I’m looking good. I think they are relieved that I’m not all shaky.

I’ve only been on tour once since the diagnosis. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go because I knew that my body was different, so I thought the best thing to do was to acknowledge it. I came on stage to Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, and when the audience applauded me, I said: ‘Och, you’re only doing that because I’m not well!’

I explained to them at the start that I have Parkinson’s and that they shouldn’t worry about my left arm, which might creep up until I looked as if I was carrying an invisible raincoat.

But I can’t prowl the stage any more like I used to. If I went to move, I limped, and I didn’t want to do that, so I just stayed where I was, mostly rooted to the spot, and moved my hands at waist level.

It was all very organic and very pleasant and the audience didn’t seem to mind. I was getting the laughs every bit as much as before – maybe even better than before.

I have come off the road now and I haven’t been playing any shows because of the Parkinson’s, but I

I was invited to join a suicide society. I said No... because they wouldn’t give me lifetime membership!

would like to do more. I don’t know what the future holds in that respect because I don’t know what state I will be in.

These days I live in Florida, but when I was back in Scotland last summer, I found that my fame and my popularity were a lot more than I thought they would be.

People seem to have got a bit frantic about me because of my Parkinson’s. For one thing there are big mural portraits of me up on walls all over Glasgow, to celebrate my 75th birthday. That left me flabbergasted. They are 50ft paintings by Rachel Maclean, Jack Vettriano and my old mate John Byrne and when I saw them I was stunned.

It had such a profound effect on me, that these genius people should have taken the time and gone to so much trouble for me.

Before I saw them, I thought that I would be laughing and joking about them but they took my breath away. Some people greet me like we’re actually family. It’s like I’m a long-lost cousin. It would be churlish to complain about it.

I’m very lucky, actually – in Scotland, I can get away with murder. If I am walking down the street and there are men down a hole digging or fixing some pipes, I say to them: ‘Come on, put your backs into it! No wonder this country is in the state it’s in!’ I’m lucky because they will burst out laughing. If a n y - body else said it to them, they would get a kick in the a***. I feel lucky to have had such a long career. Generally, my life is a joy. INEVITABLY I think sometimes about my death, but those thoughts go away as quickly as they come. I tend not to dwell on them. Somebody asked me if I wanted to join a suicide society.

It’s some organisation in Edinburgh that helps people to commit suicide and I believe that a lot of Parkinson’s sufferers choose that course of action. But I don’t want to. I’m too interested in what is going on around me. In any case, the f ***** s didn’t even offer me a lifetime membership.

I think life and death is a very simple question that is made far too complex by people who have an axe to grind. I think that when you die, you go to where you were before you were born: nowhere.

But I see myself ending up my days in Scotland. I fancy a grand parade through Glasgow, my flower-strewn coffin being carried to a magnificent marquee in George Square.

‘I would like there to be a lot of gnashing of teeth and weeping children. I have thought of being cremated and scattered on Loch Lomond, with a horizontal mourning stone so that tourists and locals can have a cup of tea on it.

But I think I want to become part of Scotland when I die. In a coffin, you just turn to dust, so I would prefer to be buried in a wicker casket, so that I actually become part of the earth. I would like a tree to be planted on top of me.

And I told my wife Pamela a long time ago the epitaph that I want on my gravestone: Jesus Christ, is that the time already?