David Mitchell: Back Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

difficult thing to come to terms with during puberty but, having done so, I would have had a justified sense of achievement at being brave enough to come out. Also my all-male educational history wouldn’t have thrown up such a barrier to flirting. I was basically a bit afraid of girls and women for a long time, in a way I don’t think I would have been about men even if those were the sort of human I had turned out to fancy.
    Anyway these fears, doubts and thoughts were a long way ahead of me as I searched for a tennis ball where I knew there wouldn’t be one, with my trousers tucked into my socks, a bit of string tied around the mac I was wearing in the sweltering sun and plastic sword at my side. The fact that I was not a king was never more bitterly apparent than at that moment. I was just a small boy and not quite as normal as I’d have liked.
    I felt I should be more into Lego. I was conscious that I wasn’t a keen reader – I much preferred television. I wanted to like porridge. It bothered me that I wasn’t more focused on the acquisition of sweets and chocolate. I’ve never been a healthy eater – my palate perversely favours fats and alcohols while sending troubled if not protesting messages to the brain when confronted with vegetation or roughage – but I’ve never much liked sweets. I like puddings, but sweets – sweet-shop sweets, cola bottles, refreshers, stuff to do with sherbet – have never really been to my taste. Which presents a bit of a problem if you aspire to be a normal boy. It’s like being a socialist on Wall Street: you find yourself not wanting the currency.
    So I settled on chocolate as a respectable sort of sweet to aspire to owning. And I liked chocolate, just nowhere near as much as toast. At Christmas and Easter, therefore, I would be given quite a lot of chocolate. I would be aware that this was a good thing; that, in the economy of children, I was briefly rich. This was a state of affairs to be cherished, I reasoned. So I wouldn’t eat it. I’d hoard it. This took very little self-control as the pleasure I took from eating chocolate was massively outweighed by the displeasure I endured from ceasing to own it.
    What a natural miser, you might think. I hope not – and I don’t think so. In general, I like what money buys more than the money itself. But I don’t spend a lot on chocolate. Of course, my nest egg – or nest of chocolate eggs – was no good to me. When I returned to my stash weeks later, it had taken on the taste of the packaging and developed that horrible white layer. A poor reward for my prudence.
    I have no idea whether these feelings of oddness and inadequacy are normal and, if so, whether I felt them to a greater or lesser than normal extent. Is it normal to feel you’re not normal but want to be normal? I think it probably is.
    I certainly don’t think that those feelings drove me to comedy. Although it may explain some of the murders (see Book 2).
    I’m always suspicious of that ‘comedy comes from pain’ reasoning. Trite magazine interviewers talk to comedians, tease a perfectly standard amount of doubt, fear and self-analysis out of them and infer therefrom that it’s this phenomenon of not-feeling-perpetually-fine that allowed them to come up with that amusing routine about towels.
    Well, correlation is not causation, as they say on Radio 4’s statistics programme More or Less . Everyone’s unhappy sometimes, and not everyone is funny. The interviewers may as well infer that the comedy comes from the inhalation of oxygen. Which of course it partly does. We have no evidence for any joke ever having emanated from a non-oxygen-breathing organism. At a sub-atomic level, oxygen is absolutely packed with hilarions.
    What distinguishes the comedian from the non-comedian, I always want to scream at the interviewers, is not that they are sometimes unhappy, solemnly self-analyse or breathe oxygen but that they reflect upon these and other things in an