One of the questions I occasionally get asked is:
“Where did the name Ricardo Bumachunski come from?”
The answer actually goes back long before the book.
Long before the travels.
Long before hearing loss, hospitals, Atlantic crossings, and all the other adventures that eventually found their way into No, I Won’t Buy You a Drink!
It goes back to childhood.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, life worked a little differently.
If you wanted to see a friend, you didn’t text them.
You didn’t check their location.
You didn’t send a message asking if they were home.
You simply turned up.
Sometimes you rode your bike across town.
Sometimes you walked.
Sometimes you arrived after a twenty-minute journey only to discover they weren’t there.
And when they weren’t there, somebody would often joke:
“He’s gone off with Ricardo Bumachunski.”
Nobody knew who Ricardo Bumachunski was.
Because he didn’t exist.
He was an imaginary friend.
An imaginary person who was never actually around because he was always doing something more exciting somewhere else.
He was off on an adventure.
Exploring.
Discovering.
Getting into trouble.
Or supposedly doing something far more interesting than sitting at home.
The joke became part of our childhood.
If somebody couldn’t be found, Ricardo Bumachunski probably had something to do with it.
Years later, when I began writing my memoir, I needed a name for the central character.
A name that felt separate from me, while still carrying the spirit of the journey.
And suddenly Ricardo Bumachunski returned.
The moment the name resurfaced, it felt right.
Not because it sounded heroic.
Not because it sounded literary.
Quite the opposite.
It sounded like curiosity.
It sounded like adventure.
It sounded like somebody who was never quite where you expected him to be.
Which, when I thought about it, wasn’t a bad description of the journey itself.
The more I wrote, the more I realised how perfectly the name fit.
The book is not really about destinations.
It isn’t about famous landmarks.
There are already enough books explaining how tall Big Ben is, what colour Buckingham Palace looks on a sunny day, and where to stand for the perfect tourist photo.
I was far more interested in the people standing next to me while everyone else was taking the photo.
The story is about experiences.
About people.
About observations.
About what happens when curiosity becomes more interesting than sightseeing.
Long after most travellers forget the opening hours of a museum or the height of a famous building, they tend to remember the people they met, the conversations they had, and the moments they never expected.
In many ways, that imaginary character from childhood had been doing exactly that all along.
Always somewhere else.
Always chasing the next story.
Always on another adventure.
There is another reason the name appealed to me.
Nobody has any assumptions about Ricardo Bumachunski.
Before readers meet him, they don’t know his politics, his income, his profession, his social status, or where he fits in the world.
They have to discover those things through the story.
The same way we discover things about real people.
Through conversation.
Through observation.
Through experience.
Not through labels.
That idea became increasingly important as I reflected on the themes explored in The Ricardo Report.
We live in a world that encourages instant judgement and instant categorisation.
Yet some of the most meaningful experiences in life come from meeting people before deciding who they are.
Perhaps that is why the name endured.
It began as a joke.
An imaginary friend who was always off doing something interesting.
Decades later, he became the perfect guide for a story built around travel, curiosity, authenticity, and paying attention to the world.
Not bad for somebody who never actually existed.
Or perhaps, in a strange way, he always did.