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Once we’d ridden in the buggy for a while, Mervin invited me and the whole film crew back to his farm for something to eat. And we’re not talking a bag of crisps here. An amazing meal was prepared by Mervin’s wife and mother, dressed in traditional long dresses, while a group of little girls, so beautiful in their bonnets, sang wee songs to themselves, completely oblivious to us.

Not everything that I experienced with Mervin was quite so idyllic, though. While we were in the buggy, he told me about a family tragedy that was so distressing it took my breath away. I’ll not tell you any more about it until we come to that part of the story. All I’ll say now is that it broke my heart. Yet Mervin had a stoicism about him that had kept him sane in the face of a terrible event. If something similar had happened to me, it would have haunted me for the rest of my life, and it might have changed me for the worse. But Mervin had an acceptance that allowed him to remain a lovely, honest, happy man.

Without any doubt, the time I spent with Mervin was one of the highlights of my life. I’ll remember that afternoon clip-clopping through Arthur, Illinois, for ever. There wasn’t much to it, but I think of my life as a series of moments and I’ve found that the great moments often don’t have too much to them. They’re not huge, complicated events; they’re just magical wee moments when somebody says ‘I love you’ or ‘You’re really good at what you do’ or simply ‘You’re a good person’. I had one that day with Mervin, the Amish furniture-maker.

The peace and simplicity of Mervin’s little community stood in stark contrast to what I’d seen over the past few days along Route 66 – that mythical highway forever associated with rock’n’roll, classic Americana and the great open road. Most people, including me, would think of wisecracking waitresses and surly short-order cooks in classic fifties diners. Grease monkeys with dirty rags and tyre wrenches. Gas-pump jockeys and highway patrolmen. Oklahoma hillbillies in overalls and work boots. Stetson-wearing Texan ranch owners and cowboys at a rodeo. Idealistic hitch-hikers following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac. Eccentric owners of Route 66-themed tourist haunts. Native Americans in the Navajo and Apache reservations of New Mexico and Arizona. Maybe even a few surfers, hippies or internet entrepreneurs in California.

I’d already met a few of them, but when I’d set out from Chicago a few days earlier, my greatest hope had been to make a connection with someone just like Mervin. I’d thought back to similar trips I’d made in the past, like my tour of Britain and my journey across Australia. Every journey had involved visits to historic sites, explorations of beautiful landscapes, and planned meetings with locals and various dignitaries. The itinerary had always been tightly scheduled, as it has to be when shooting a television series. But in every case the best moments had resulted from an unexpected encounter with an interesting character – like the time ten years earlier when I’d made a television series called Billy Connolly’s World Tour of England, Ireland and Wales.

I met dozens of fascinating people and visited scores of locations between Dublin and Plymouth, but the highlight came when I visited the grave of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, at the parish church of St Peter in Bournemouth. I suppose you could say I’m a bit freaky, because I’ve always been fond of graveyards. Many people think of them as morbid, sad places, but to me they’re monuments to great lives lived and they provide a connection to our ancestors and heritage. They’re full of stories about people. And the story of Mary and her fantastically talented husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, is as good as they come. Which was why, one sunny day, I was standing beside her grave with a television camera and a furry microphone pointing at me.

Just as I was telling the tragic story of how Percy Shelley drowned in Italy, a stooped figure appeared in the graveyard. Dressed