Nerd Do Well Read Online Free PDF Page B

reaction to it by my mum represented the first cycle of a process I would often play out through my childhood and into my professional life as an adult which, according to the number of years spent existing, is what I am now.
    I was sat at the dining table at my nan’s house in Gloucester, having lunch with my mum (shortcrust-pastry meat pie and veg). We were talking about school and the various friends I had made, in particular one friend whose father was a dentist.
    ‘Nathaniel’s dad is a dentist,’ I declared.
    ‘Where does he practise?’ Mum enquired.
    ‘He doesn’t,’ I replied. ‘He’s a real one.’
    I clearly remember calculating the double meaning of the word ‘practise’ and seeing the opportunity to create a joke that would make my mother laugh. Not in a knowing sense, I wasn’t a junior Groucho Marx; I saw the deliberate misunderstanding as a means of being amusing in a ‘kids say the funniest things’ sort of way. I had no intention of admitting that my comment was wilfully intended as funny. For some reason it seemed funnier to me if I played innocent and worked the humour from an accidental standpoint, so in that sense it was my first stab at character comedy too; the six-year-old me playing a slightly more guileless version of myself. A Simple Simon if you will.
    It was around this time that I was suddenly lifted out of my exclusive Gloucestershire private school and supplanted to far more inclusive inner-city pre-school, with a far greater variety of class and ethnicity. Away from the rarefied rituals of Gloucester’s King’s School, the interior of which doubled as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter movies, I began to learn life lessons.
    One of my clearest memories of Calton Road Junior School involves a girl whose name I think was Karen, all hair and a tartan flannel dress, the faint smell of must surrounding her in an invisible cloud. Without any prompting, she leaned over to me in assembly one morning between hymns and asked if I wanted to hear the rudest word in the world. Intrigued, I nodded, at which point she shielded her mouth with her right hand, in case any morally indignant lip-readers were watching from the gym ropes, and whispered the word ‘cunt’ into my ear. I remember her solemn monosyllabic whisper, the way the ‘c’ formed a glottal rasp in the back of her throat, the way that the word itself sounded like a sort of nasal cough. This alien, magic word I had never heard before seemed dark and portentous to me, like I’d just been let in on a secret, the burden of which I did not wish to carry and nothing would ever be the same again. It made complete sense. I believed her. It sounded like the rudest word in the world.
    I never told my mother about it, despite always feeling able to talk to her about anything, and always being keen to impart anything that might garner a reaction.
    In fact, even by this tender age, I was already prone to showing off and was often accused of it by my peers, in that slightly bitter way that stifles creativity and shames children into shrinking into invisibility, although that didn’t entirely work on me. Even as a baby, I would do impressions of my grandfather and send my parents into paroxysms of giggles. He was a conductor of brass bands and whenever my mum or dad would ask, ‘What does Pop-Pop do, Simon?’ I would wave my arms in the air, not because I understood the concept of coordinating the mood and tempo of a throng of musicians, but because such an action would elicit a peal of approving laughter, essentially what the comedic mind craves,
an immediate external validation by way of an involuntary, positive emotional response
. At least that’s what my therapist said before I stabbed him in the cheek with a biro.
    You could argue that the comic is the most impatient and neurotic amid the ranks of the insecure. Not only do they require approval, they require it immediately, that evident and tangible