Saying you’re a fan of Sir Billy Connolly is the equivalent of saying you’re a fan of air because let’s face it who isn’t? The Big Yin turns 75-years-old later this year and it’s recently been announced that he’s to be Knighted in the Queen’s birthday honours list.

He also received an honorary degree from Strathclyde University, not too shabby indeed I’m sure you’ll agree.

Billy reacted to the news as you’d expect by suggesting he should be called Sir Lancelot after being knighted as “Sir Billy doesn’t quite have the same ring” to it.

My first introduction to the big yin was back in 1988. It was the year of the Glasgow Garden Festival and I had spent the entire summer praying I’d be tall enough to ride the famous Coca Cola Ride.

I was eight-years-old and I’d heard there was a minimum height requirement of 130cm and I was coming in at about 128cm so my plan of action was to eat as many extra helpings of vegetables that I could stomach to help me grow asap.

There was no chance I was going back to school after the summer holidays having not screamed my little lungs out on that big belter of a roller coaster. All of my friends had been on it and primary four would have been utterly ruined if I didn’t stretch those extra two centimetres. There was always the possibility of wearing my mum’s high heels but that was also a risky option as I was a shoe size two and my mother was a six so thick socks would be required.

The atmosphere in Glasgow that summer was simply electric and if I remember rightly it was boiling hot summer because my tennis hero Steffi Graf won Wimbledon that year and we had created our own Wimbledon courts on our street with chalk to play on and there wasn’t a single day of rain.

My gran adored the People’s Palace and wanted to take me and my sister Lynsey along to show us something called a “singl-end” house that she used to lived in when my mum was a wee girl. When I got there I was amazed at all the wonderful things on display but what made me stop dead in my tracks was the giant pair of banana boots peering down at me.

I wanted a pair immediately as they were the coolest things I’d ever seen. My gran explained that they’d belonged to a very famous man from Glasgow who was very, very funny. As soon as I got home I asked my dad if I could hear some of the man’s jokes. He said I had to wait until I was a big girl but I didn’t have to wait long as a repeat of An Audience With Billy Connolly was shown on telly that Christmas and even though I couldn’t understand all of the jokes I laughed so hard just watching my dad laughing.

As I grew up I came to adore Billy’s work from The Crucifixion to the tenement house parties to the wire brush and dettol story. In 2012 I actually got to meet the man himself during the STV Appeal and as you can imagine I was nothing short of a blithering wreck in his company.

Meeting your idol is an extremely difficult thing because you want to remain cool, calm and collected but you inevitably end up bubbling and greeting telling them how much you love them, or at least that’s what I did. He was as charming and lovely as I’d hope and he even started following me on Twitter which was honestly one of the highlights of my life as he was only following 25 people at the time. Once I had tweeted about drinking coffee tequila shots on a night out and he responded simply with “What are you on aboot McManus??” To which my lovely friend Sanjeev Kohli replied “Did Michelle McManus just get Twitter slap by the big yin?” Yes, I most certainly did get telt and skelped by the bold Billy and it was a proud moment for me indeed.

Here’s to you Billy, Glasgow's favourite son. I hope you’ve parked that bike and you’re sitting back, enjoying all the love that’s comin your way because after all the years of laughter you’ve brought to millions of people around the world you deserve every bit of it.