My Shit Life So Far Read Online Free PDF Page A

but some of the kids got on for a backie. I still have this vivid picture of him shooting off across the waste ground at the end. He might have been the last truly free individual I ever met and is no doubt dead.
    I had a rich fantasy life as a kid, honed on the dullness of my surroundings. I read The Hobbit when I was little and after that every magic-type kids’ book that I could find. I loved Alan Garner and Diana Wynne-Jones, and just read that stuff all the time.
    My own fantasies were a whole lot weirder than anything in the books. I had this baroque story that I thought about for years. I’d go off and play on my own, thinking about it and acting out the scenes. I was a magician who travelled from town to town in some Middle Earth-type world with his travelling companion who—get this—was an enormous guy that he had created from mud. My companion, whose name escapes me, was always falling to pieces and I’d have to redo the spells. He had rubies for eyes—not any old rubies, but magic rubies that I stored powerful fire spells in. The stories largely involved the two of us rocking up to town and not getting any respect from the local king or whoever. He’d generally try to put us in jail or set his men on us. That’s when my good buddy would unleash all the pent-up rage in his fiery eye, often burning not just the king and his men but the whole town that had disrespected us.
    But here’s the best bit. I had a sword that would cut whoever it touched and give them a wound that would never heal. I think I must have read about that somewhere. In some versions of the story, I had cut myself with the sword, all down one arm, so my arm was hidden and bandaged in my cloak and I was often weak. The story regularly revolved around me trying to rest up while we were in prison or being chased. My fiery friend would stand guard over me while I summoned up enough energy todestroy our enemies. Later on in life, this made my national standup tour feel pretty familiar.
    My brother and sister and I were allowed to get one comic each a week. We’d get The Victor and The Dandy and sometimes others. I was never one for savouring the artwork; I just loved the stories. My favourite in The Victor was a thing called‘Deathwish’. It was about a racing driver and sometime stuntman who had been horribly disfigured in a crash. He wore a mask to cover his injuries and basically longed for death. Each week he’d try to do something in the race or stunt he was working on to kill himself. It always backfired and helped him win his race or do an amazing stunt, much to his disappointment. There was a brilliant panel once of him coming to in his hospital bed to the sound of popping champagne corks, just lying there looking disgusted.
    I’d plough through our comics quickly and read my sister’s Bunty when nobody was looking. It had a lot of weird stuff.‘Susan the Sham’ was great: a girl who’d been in a traffic accident and had an evil uncle who was making her pretend to be deaf for compensation reasons. Every week she’d overhear something she really ought to tell somebody about but couldn’t. One of the main stories—did I dream this?—was about a lassie who lived a pretty much normal life except for one thing. She was trapped inside an enormous energy ball. She’d go to school in it and have to deal with a certain amount of hassle but when it got too much she could always just shoot off into the sky in this fiery orb. I once tried to make a sketch about this for a pilot I wasdoing. The producer read the script and then said one of my favourite-ever sentences:
    ‘Do you know how much of our budget it would take to create an energy ball?’
    That’s the great thing about television. Sometimes, you just feel that anything could happen. The guy didn’t say it was impossible. He was just thinking of the repercussions of sticking an actress in a big, glowing energy ball!
    A new comic came out that was an absolute mindblower. The