Back Story

by David Mitchell

  And then there are people – and these don’t unsettle but enrage me – who think comedy is trivial. They believe that serious, intelligent people should focus on worthy, momentous things and that jokes, levity, piss-taking, subverting and satirising are the pastimes of the second-rate. Words cannot express how second-rate I consider such people. In my experience the properly intelligent, whether they’re astrophysicists, politicians, poets, lawyers, entrepreneurs, comedians, taxi drivers, plumbers or doctors, however serious or trivial their career aims, all adore jokes. And they have that in common with a lot of idiots.

  For as long as I can remember, I have always thought that being funny is the cleverest thing you can do, that taking the piss out of something – parodying it, puncturing it – is at least as clever as making that thing in the first place. This view, which, I’m happy to say, will be most offensive to the people I want most to offend, was probably formed watching my cold grandfather, with all his financial acumen and preference for fish over humans, cry with laughter at a van being repeatedly driven into a swimming pool.

  - 6 -

  Death of a Monster

  My attempt to swerve round another bus stop is scuppered when I can’t help stopping to stare at the advert on it – for Turkey. ‘Bootiful!’ declares a bronzed Bernard Matthews as the Aegean sparkles behind him. It must have been his last gig before he died – and a great piece of lateral thinking from the guys in Ankara.

  Or it would have been, if they’d actually had Bernard Matthews. Sadly – and this is where I can’t pretend ad executives are fools – the Turkey advert halts me in my tracks not with a great visual pun, but with a picture of a girl’s arse. The arse is flecked with white sand and in the background are some Roman ruins. Now, that’s pulling in two different marketing directions. You can get away with women in bikinis on holiday pictures because you’re saying it’s a sunny climate in which to go to the beach. If the woman looks sexy and men associate the destination with sexy thoughts, that’s not your fault. You might even give the bikini woman a toned husband and small child to make it even more respectable. Although that reduces the subliminal sexiness.

  But if you stick white sand on the arse of the bikini-clad woman, there’s nothing incidental about it. You’re in the realm of also showing a tantalising glimpse of the side of a breast. Really, you might as well at that stage. You absolutely never see that sort of bikini-clad woman with kids. You’re overtly going for sexiness and taking the risk that you look a bit cheap as a result.

  So putting a Roman ruin next to the sandy bottom is mixing your messages. It’s too late to go all ‘lecture tour of the Med’ – that’s like a Spearmint Rhino club saying it’s got a library. It doesn’t take the curse off the arse any more than if one of the adhering bits of sand turned out to be an interesting shell or fossil. An alliance between the history-liking parts of the brain and the bronzed and shapely woman-liking parts of the penis is unlikely to convince. It’s a coalition without credibility.

  Holidays were a big deal for my parents when I was little. Most of the year was spent planning the summer holiday, which puzzled me because I would have been just as happy spending the fortnight at home. It seemed nonsensical to be going somewhere we wouldn’t have access to a television.

  The first summer holiday I remember was in France when I was four. We went to a village called Benodet on the Brittany coast and stayed in a caravan. A British holiday company had put loads of them there, so that holiday-makers on a budget could soak up the Gallic atmosphere by living in France as trailer park trash for two weeks. I must say, I loved it.

  It was a big financial stretch for my parents, largely because of the poor exchange rate. It may surprise you to learn that I wasn’t aware of that at the time. But, no, I’m not that intelligent/tedious, I’m afraid/relieved to say. I think at that point I probably wasn’t even aware of how money worked in my own country.

  I remember shopping trips with my mother when I was very small. In those days, food shopping still involved going to lots of different places: baker’s, butcher’s, greengrocer’s, fishmonger’s, etc. All the old types of shop were present except for the grocer’s, which had been supplanted by a supermarket. But my mother would only buy things like tinned food, sugar and flour there – nothing that needed to be fresh. I don’t think she would have said so but I suspect she considered that ‘common’.

  The other ‘shop’ I was aware of was the bank, which, I had been told, was where you went to get money. I assumed that they just gave it to you and then you exchanged it for all the other things you needed. When you ran out, you went back for more. The relationship between work, earning and spending was lost on me. It was an attitude prescient of the boom conditions of the early 2000s. It came as a nasty shock when my mother explained to me that the bank only looked after your money – it didn’t give it to you – and you had to work in order to get hold of it.

  So my parents’ reduced spending power, thanks to a weak pound and a strong franc, was beyond my understanding and I only know about it because it was mentioned on future holidays.

  ‘It’s a lot easier now you get ten francs to the pound,’ my father would often say.

  ‘Yes, it was terrible when we first came. Everything was so expensive,’ my mother would reply.

  That memory won’t go away. When I’m befuddled and incontinent in a home, in anywhere between one and six decades’ time, my last coherent remarks will be on the subject of exchange rates in the late 1970s. In the summer of 1978, all I knew was that French things were prohibitively expensive, as I wouldn’t have put it at the time.

  Eating out, for example – which didn’t bother me but must have been a shame for my parents because it meant we largely ate food they’d brought with them. But I was introduced to French bread, Orangina and Boursin – all things that were then unobtainable in Britain. The fact that I liked the Boursin came as a massive surprise to my parents who, like most Britons at the time, thought garlic was a bit exotic. They liked it, but they thought of it as an adult or acquired taste, rather than a very basic ingredient that the British inexplicably decided to turn their nose up at for a few generations.

  The other food which I was encouraged to try was lobster. At one point in the holiday, as a special treat and to make up for the fact that they couldn’t afford to eat in any of the nice French restaurants, my parents decided to buy and cook a lobster. A lobster that was alive. I know that’s the only way fresh lobsters come, but it seemed to me a perverse way to buy food. I was aware that much of what I ate had once roamed free and careless, but my instinctive response – and one that I stick to – was not to think about it: to avoid contemplating the fact that my dinner may once have been a lovable, cuddly, helpless thing.

  I discovered that lobsters didn’t fall into that category when my parents purchased what I can only describe as a small monster. I am not saying lobsters are evil. The fact that they are hard, cold, spiny and viciously armed, rather than large-eyed and soft-furred, is not, I realise, a moral failing. It is arbitrary, maybe even prejudiced, that humans tend to lavish affection on fellow warm-blooded mammals and quite right that those who choose to keep spiders, snakes and scorpions as pets should not be run out of town as twisted perverts but respected as animal-lovers.

  But lobsters definitely look evil. And, while I admit that I have never met one under conditions likely to bring out the best in a crustacean, I have yet to see evidence of their goodwill. It is human nature to be repelled by such creatures – just as it is human nature to think, quite wrongly, that it might be a good idea to cuddle a lion cub.

  As a four-year-old, I was even more hardline about this than I am now. In this weird country where no one could speak comprehensibly and we were living in a strange stationary yet wheeled shed, the two people charged with my care had located and purchased a sort of giant aqua wasp, brought it into our cramped living quarters still alive and now proposed to make it the focus of dinner. At this point I would have settl
ed for a croquette potato.

  But what could I do? I argued, I moaned but, deep down, I figured my parents knew best. They seemed all-powerful and all-knowing. Which shows you how stupid four-year-olds are, because now I realise that they were 31 and broke. When I was 31, I don’t think I had a credit card. I was living a studenty existence in a council flat with no candles. The idea that, with only such a brief span on the planet as preparation, they felt able to make a four-year-old, take it to France and obtain a miniature monster for dinner is breathtaking. Why weren’t they just hanging around London getting pissed?

  And, as if to prove the very point that our four-year-old hero might go on to make 33 years later if he survives his encounter with the monster of the deep (I’m trying to build suspense), it soon transpired that my parents didn’t have the first clue what to do with a live lobster other than release it back into the wild via a long, agonising and smelly death in a bin.

  Actually, that’s not fair. They had several clues – as I imagine you do if you’re one of the many people who’ve never cooked a lobster but have been hanging around in a world where that’s the sort of thing some other people do. You’ll have vague notions about plunging it into boiling water, or maybe sticking a pin into it in a very precise way that kills it but doesn’t hurt it – or, according to some, agonisingly paralyses it but stops it from wriggling around, which amounts to the same thing. You’ll be simultaneously thinking about what’s most humane and also what might preclude getting your finger snipped off by one of the beast’s terrifying claws. What they, like you, didn’t have was any facts.

  But they had a secret weapon: my mother is a woman and is consequently able to ask strangers for advice and information. And my father, being a man, is able to sidle up while she does this and vaguely listen. So they formed a plan: they would ask the French couple in the caravan next door how you cook a lobster. Brilliant.

  My parents don’t really speak French. There is no transcript of their exchange with the French couple but, having concluded it, they returned to the caravan firmly of the opinion that the way you cook a live lobster is to put it straight in a pan of cold water, making no attempt to poke it with a pin or anything, and slowly bring it to the boil.

  When I’ve told people about this since, reactions have varied. Some say ‘Oh my God, how barbaric!’ Some give a nervous ‘Oh, right …’ in expectation of the horrors to come. Others say, ‘Didn’t they mean boiling water? Don’t you plunge it in boiling water?’ and still others say, ‘Yes, that is how you cook a lobster.’ I’ve noticed that responses of the last kind go up proportionally to the age and life-experience of the people I’m telling the story to. Therefore, sceptical though I have long been of the French couple’s knowledge and my parents’ linguistic skills, I’m forced to contemplate the possibility that that is genuinely how you cook a lobster. If so, let me tell you it’s no picnic. No idiomatic picnic. It may circumstantially be a picnic but one which you will come away from humorously saying, ‘That was no picnic.’ If you do, may that shaft of levity help you come to terms with the horrors.

  The caravan was narrow. At one end were two bedrooms, the bathroom and the door to the outside world; at the other, the main seating area. In between were the galley kitchen and dining table booth. This formed a bottle neck – you could only walk on one side, the galley kitchen side, of the table if you wanted to get out. This wasn’t usually a problem. (See map.)

  My mother was twitchy from the start and hovered as nervously over my father’s shoulder while he put the lobster into the saucepan as he would over hers if she’d asked a stranger about local restaurants. She was, I remember clearly, on the door side of him and the hob. I wasn’t – I was in the sitting room bit. At this stage the creature was docile, no doubt traumatised by having been out of water for a while. Consequently, on arriving in the pan, it relaxed. This has been a weird day, it was probably thinking, and things are still far from normal but this water, albeit under-salinated and in an unfamiliar steely environment, is definitely an improvement. I tell you what, if that really is what the lobster was thinking, I’m never eating whitebait again.

  ‘Why can’t you spare a thought for the poor creature?’ you’re probably screaming at the page by now. I’m sorry. You’re right. Above all, this was a bad day for the lobster. I accept that intellectually. I just couldn’t feel sorry for it at the time – it looked too alien and terrifying, too nasty. I was too frightened to feel mercy. Also, I ate meat. I always have and I suspect I always will. As incidents where you’re brought face to face with the reality of that go, the demise of a heavily armoured, dark, eyeless, snapping creature is a lot less likely to make you reach for the nut roast than seeing a bewildered and affectionate lamb gambol past a mint sauce factory towards some rotor blades.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. You don’t know what happened yet. The lobster might win. So, the lobster’s in the pan, my father’s at the stove, my mother hovering by his side, I’m in the sitting area, moaning about this whole ill-conceived plan, and the Calor has just been ignited under the crustacean’s new home. This is the calm before the storm, the phoney war.

  The spell is broken by the lobster. It has begun to smell a rat. My parents had added one for flavour. Not really, I’m speaking metaphorically. The lobster is starting to suspect that the apparent improvement in its fortunes was no more than a dead cat bounce. (It’s massively into animal metaphors.) It has noticed that the water has begun to get warmer.

  I don’t remember the details of the next few minutes. I assume my dad held on to the pan as the lobster inside moved around in an inquisitive, then concerned, then agitated and finally enraged and panicked fashion. I only remember the last stage. The pan is now full of very hot water and the lobster is throwing everything into a dramatic bid for escape. The phoney war is well and truly over. My mother breaks like the Maginot line and runs out of the caravan.

  I would gladly follow her, but my father, struggling with a boiling hot pan containing an enraged mini-monster, stands in my path. I make a few hesitant steps towards him, and a furious and steaming claw flails from under the saucepan lid sending searing splashes everywhere. A droplet lands on my knee. I know, with all my heart, with a terrible, chilling certainty, that the creature wants me dead. There will be no appeasing it if it escapes.

  I refuse to eat any of the lobster. I think I’m making a point, but I imagine my parents were happy enough to polish it off themselves.

  - 7 -

  Civis Britannicus Sum

  Now I come to think of it, almost half of the memories I have from family holidays come from that trip to France. I remember the children’s roundabout outside the hypermarket, where, if you were lucky enough to be in one of the helicopters, there was a lever you could pull that would make it rise AS IF YOU WERE REALLY FLYING A HELICOPTER – I still feel this ride is the crowning achievement of French culture.

  I remember the doctor who gave me a series of injections in my arse because, with a child’s unerring instinct for inconveniencing his parents, I’d developed the first symptoms of asthma while we were on holiday (and the French will inject you in the arse on pretty much any occasion when a British doctor would go for the shoulder; the arse is apparently the better place for it and the French believe, quite wrongly, that optimising health is more important than avoiding embarrassment).

  I remember the ferry trip there and back which, in my view, was more enjoyable than any other single part of the fortnight.

  But one of the few things I don’t remember from that holiday is arriving home again – that feeling of being glad to be back in Britain, which I remember from all my other trips abroad.

  In general, you don’t see Britain at its best when you re-enter it after a holiday. Places such as Heathrow airport and the docks at Portsmouth are fairly unpleasant. One worries what it looks like to foreigners and wants to make excuses for it. It’s like you’ve just introduced an old friend to a group of people and then noticed he’s
got a damp patch round his crotch.

  Gatwick airport is the worst. It’s been there for decades and yet it never seems to be finished. It won’t settle into being a mere scar on the landscape, however brutal. It remains an open sore. It also insists on putting up posters advertising how much money it’s spending on all this building work, which simply make you think: 1. You should have spent that money ages ago – before you opened the airport perhaps. Or: 2. The charlatans, incompetents and security hysterics who run this hellhole somehow have lots of money – there is no justice on earth.

  But in spite of Gatwick airport, or whichever unlovely point of entry to the UK I’m trying to negotiate, I always feel, and have always felt, a huge wave of pride and patriotism when I come back to Britain. I’ll happily sit in traffic on the M25 contemplating how much nicer our crash barriers and motorway signs are than those in France/Spain/the USA/Italy. I’ll find the drizzle atmospheric. I’ll admire our number-plates, our skips, our yellow road grit containers, our keep-left signs, our pylons.

  And it isn’t just a fondness for the familiar. It feels like I know that they’re better, that this is a better country, whatever its inadequacies, than anywhere else. This sounds tremendously jingoistic and doesn’t, for a moment, stand to reason. But I think it’s a common inclination. In its most developed forms, it leads to extremism. But I’m hoping the mild case of it that I suffer from is harmless enough and just results in my being broadly pleased with where I live.

  There’s an opposite and balancing prejudice from which, judging by my circle of friends, just as many people suffer. That is to be inclined, in the same knee-jerk way, to dislike the attributes of your own country, to find French/Mexican/Indonesian light switches/police hats/parking meters better than our own.

  This is no more based on reason than my patriotic inclination, but I reckon it’s more socially acceptable – or, at the very least, deemed cooler. I feel slightly bitter about that. As prejudices go, surely it’s worse, more misanthropic, to be inclined unfairly against the country where you’re brought up than it is to favour it?