David Mitchell: Back Story (13 page)

- 12 -

Presidents of the Galaxy

When are you in Regent’s Park but not in Regent’s Park? When you’re at the Marriott Regent’s Park. Or to give it its correct name which is also, in its own way, incorrect: the Marriott Regents Park.

That’s the large hotel I’m passing on King Henry’s Road; architecturally it looks quite holidayish. It wouldn’t be out of place on the Majorcan coast. When I lived round here, we’d occasionally go for a drink in the bar, instead of going to the pub – although I think it might have been a Holiday Inn then.

You can’t see the park but, to be fair, it would be a very quick taxi ride or a ten-minute walk. Globally speaking it’s extremely close to Regent’s Park. At the solar system level they’re indistinguishable, part of the same speck. At a pan-galactic level, you’d reflect that the number of things in the universe further away from Regent’s Park than the Marriott Regents Park so utterly dwarfs the number of things closer that to complain would seem churlish. But I still reckon that an inter-dimensional traveller, on being shown to his room with a view of the A41, might have to bite his tongue (or tongues) to prevent himself (or herself or itself or third-alien-gender-self) from muttering that he thought it might have been a bit closer to Regent’s Park than this. And that they might have fucking kept the apostrophe.

When we drank there, I found it engagingly anonymous – a perfectly adequate hotel which could have been anywhere – certainly its name isn’t a particularly good clue. Also, the lager may have been slightly more expensive than in a pub but you got free peanuts. I think I worked out that, if you were on for a big night of peanut-eating, it might even work out cheaper. My friends were less keen to go there than I was, possibly because it was so devoid of atmosphere but possibly also because they didn’t feel they belonged there. We were a bunch of scuzzy, unemployed and impecunious ex-students and this was a place full of businessmen. I don’t think we were sneered at but it felt like a possibility.

I quite liked that possibility. I liked the idea of some self-important sales manager trying to assert that he had more right to buy a lager in a hotel than I did – so that I could angrily respond that my money was as good as his, while secretly thinking that it was better (even if it was far less plentiful). I suppose as a middle-class ex-public schoolboy I got a feeling of social confidence from a middle-ranking hotel (after all, my parents used to manage such places) which even the empty pockets and frayed clothes of the unsuccessful freelancer couldn’t shake. In fact, it was probably those very reduced circumstances that made me seek out the reassurance of an environment of unremarkable prosperity.

And also I fancy myself a bit. I reckon I’m something (or ‘summut’ as they say in Yorkshire, where almost everyone reckons they’re something and yet particularly resents it in others, so expressing it in fewer letters saves millions of man hours). That’s not to say that I don’t sometimes feel very shit about myself – I’m not always nice, organised, hard-working or sensible. But however broke, scruffy and unemployed I became, I could never quite shake my feeling that I was a man of consequence.

I really hope I don’t come across as if that’s what I think about myself. I’d hate to seem immodest. Not here, of course. I’m perfectly resigned to seeming immodest here – and I do so in a spirit of honesty. But I very seldom want people to realise that’s what I feel. Not because I’m ashamed of feeling a bit special (I hope everyone does) but because I’ve been brought up to believe that behaving modestly is one of the keystones of politeness. It’s something that maddens me about the direction our culture seems to be taking – led by reality TV – that this convention of modesty is being lost. In programmes such as
The X Factor
and
The Apprentice
, contestants are encouraged to voice the most megalomaniacal aspects of their self-belief and, should they be unfortunate enough actually to
be
as modest as I wish in non-autobiographical contexts to seem, to exaggerate them. We’re sliding into a society where the first thing you need to do to demonstrate that you’re any good at something is to say that you are. Under the old rules, boasts were assumed empty until proved otherwise. You had to impress with your actions, draw attention to yourself subtly without being seen to do so. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than the pantomime of self-belief we see on reality TV today. A society where you’re not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that’s being ushered in.

One of the weird side effects of my continued adherence to this fading convention is that sometimes it makes people think I have low self-esteem. Mostly this is a misapprehension from which I profit, as people are apt to be fonder of those they think of as self-doubting. But it’s annoying when people not only assume I think I’m shitter than I do, but then agree with that estimation. It reminds me of a moment in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
when Arthur Dent, the hapless and very British central character, has been unusually helpful in a crisis. Zaphod Beeblebrox, the cool, preening, transatlantic-voiced President of the Galaxy, congratulates him and Dent replies: ‘Oh it was nothing.’ Beeblebrox says: ‘Oh was it? Forget it then.’

Some might think that acting all modest and yet feeling all megalomaniacal is dishonest. I say it’s a cultural thing. And of course it’s not megalomania (well, if it is, I’m the worst person to judge – just don’t put me in charge of soldiers), it’s just general high self-esteem. And it means that when I do have moments of self-loathing, I don’t feel worthless but that I’ve let myself down – which implies that, even when feeling low, I still sense that there’s something to let down.

And to those who say to me: ‘Oh I can see you’re the nervous one,’ or ‘You seem shy,’ I sometimes want to reply: ‘If I’m shy, why am I standing on the shiny platform?’ In showbusiness there are a lot of complete extroverts who uncomplicatedly want to be on stage being looked at. I’m a bit shyer than that; I don’t always like it. But at the end of the day, people who really hate the limelight don’t choose to stand in it.

I don’t know where my feeling of self-confidence comes from. Being the loved child of nice intelligent people in comfortable circumstances is an excellent start – but there are plenty of doted-on kids of the middle classes who doggedly self-loathe and self-harm. If I had to pick a reason why I’ve avoided that, I might very well plump for Form VI, the scholarship set at New College School, for boys who might win scholarships to public school.

I was a swot – I was one of the boys who were good at exams. In fact, I don’t think I’m flattering myself when I say that, in my year, I was the best at exams. I admit that this made me very proud. I loved being the best at something. I could never be best at sport – the activity that most schoolboys would probably choose to excel at – but being best at lessons was a very acceptable second-best sort of best.

I also had a sense that the disproportionate cachet which sporting prowess attracted was not something that would continue in the adult world. It’s caused by evolution failing to keep up with mankind’s fast-changing circumstances. Our enthusiasm for signs of physical strength and agility over the mental equivalents made a lot more sense when the economy was more reliant on catching woolly mammoth by hand than it has been for some millennia. Twenty million years from now, the boys who are good at maths will be cool and popular and get the girls – and by that time there won’t be an equation on earth that isn’t solved by robots.

So the swots weren’t top of the boys’ social tree, but they were valued, accorded grudging respect and not bullied. There were only seven of us in the scholarship set and we were, fairly ridiculously, treated like adults. The teachers enjoyed our lessons and so did we – and we didn’t have to pretend otherwise. This was an environment in which Lisa Simpson would have found acceptance – if she weren’t a girl.

We were constantly told that we were bright and special and that this was a brilliant academic opportunity afforded to few. It was assumed, even at that age, that we would go on to achieve things: get scholarships, go to Oxbridge, become professors (only academic success was really aspired to – no one was pushing us to become entrepreneurs). Our expectations and self-image were managed upwards. I loved it and I genuinely think that I’ve never quite lost the glow that being treated like that at a young age gave me. It has waxed and waned with my fortunes but never disappeared entirely.

- 13 -

Badges

While I was failing to achieve sporting prowess, I remember as I walk up onto Primrose Hill, where a group of schoolboys are playing football with the seriousness of
Guardian
readers discussing independent cinema, I was often supervised by a teacher smoking a cigar. It was Mr Roberts, the one who wrote comic plays about the politics of early imperial Rome, and he was just as averse to exercise as I was.

We were divided up for sport and I certainly wasn’t in the scholarship set there. I was in ‘Group B’ with all the other speccy nerds and, when we were in Mr Roberts’s unenthusiastic charge, we didn’t have to play football – a relief all round as it’s difficult to get a game going when
all
the players are running away from the ball. Mr Roberts didn’t seem to own a tracksuit and so, instead of having to negotiate the muddy playing field, he just told us to run round the University Parks, where he could stand on the tarmac path in his Chelsea boots and leather jacket, puffing away.

But sometimes football was unavoidable. I didn’t realise that mud had a smell before I first walked into the school’s small pavilion in the corner of the sports field to change from plimsolls into football boots. The floor was littered with dried clods from the bottom of other boys’ boots with holes where the studs had been – like little mud six-pack rings for cork-sized beer cans – and it gave off an odd, flat, nothingy scent. Like the olfactory equivalent of white noise. It depressed me and made me feel sorry for the boys for whom the bland smell of chalk and books was equally unsettling.

I also fiercely resisted attempts to make me try for swimming badges. These were an obsession of my parents, largely because Richard Slater kept getting them. Richard Slater was, like me (and I hope he’ll forgive me for saying so), a timorous weed. We were good friends and our parents were good friends. Then, at some point, we stopped being friends – I don’t really know why. From then on, it seemed, all I would hear about him was his swimming prowess. My parents wouldn’t shut up about what badges he was trying for or getting, and how I should be doing the same thing. It wasn’t just distance swimming but various proficiency and survival awards, named after Olympic metals, which seemed to involve a bewildering range of aqua-activities: treading water for various periods of time in various states of undress, retrieving objects from the bottom of the pool, befriending dolphins, etc. The holders of the gold awards, it seemed to me, would have been able to infiltrate Atlantis.

It was really wearing. I wanted to say: ‘Look, do you want me to actually
be
Richard Slater? Is that your big idea? Because, I’d say, overall I prefer me to Richard Slater and I think you do too. You don’t get to cherry-pick the good aspects of Richard Slater and add them to all my stuff. You take the Slater swimming but you’ll be stuck with all the other tedious Slaterisms into the bargain!’

But I did feel a bit guilty. What was wrong with me, I wondered, that I found the prospect of going to a swimming pool for weekly lessons, building up to an unnecessary test in which you had to swim a terrifying distance and then fashion a rudimentary float out of a pair of pyjamas, so unappealing? I hated the thought of that test and its pointless survival situation. What was it supposed to prepare us for? A world where air travel has disappeared and, in this post-aeroplane future where we’re all getting liners to the United States because that’s where the food is, the U-boats only attack at night?

So, what did I have to fill the gap where obsessive sport-love wasn’t?

Love Life:
obviously not – not at that age. I’m middle-class. And don’t hold your breath, by the way. If that’s what you’re here for, you’ll have to skip forward a
long
way. But careful you don’t crease the spine because you may just want to get your money back. So, no love life or crushes or trysts. By which I mean both (a) I didn’t have a prepubescent sweetheart, to whom I used coyly to give daisies while wearing a straw hat and posing for a greetings card photographer and with whom I had my first fumbling sexual experiences four or five years later in a hay loft – or possibly a straw loft, full of straw waiting to be turned into hats; and (b) I wasn’t abused.

At some point in 1986 I remember getting an erection watching a Madonna video, although I had absolutely no idea what to do about it and no way of getting in touch with Madonna to ask.

Hobbies:
I collected badges. Non-swimming badges. But only out of duty, like a Japanese businessman glumly taking golf lessons. If we went to any tourist attraction – Warwick Castle, the Tower of London, etc. – I would always buy a badge from the gift shop and I kept all those badges in a tin. I never wore them, I never displayed them, they’re probably still in the drawer in Oxford where I last added to them in about 1987.

I don’t know what gift shops sell these days – I never go into them. Probably themed iPod covers, business card cases, novelty condoms, cheese knives and melon ballers. Maybe porn? Maybe you can get tourist-attraction-themed jazz mags where the Madame Tussauds waxworks are all doing each other in a big gangbang. I wouldn’t be surprised. Honestly, what is the world coming to? I’m really surprised.

Speaking of gangbangs, or gangs at the very least, I didn’t join the Cub Scouts. That’s what you had to do if you wanted to become a proper human – or so my parents heavily implied. It would be a great way of meeting other children and broadening my range of interests, so that I didn’t just spend all my time watching
Knight Rider
– that was their view. I did not share it. I had an aversion to fresh air and didn’t want to go camping. That seemed to be the jewel in the cubs’ crown of activities – or the turd in their cesspit, as I saw it. The concept of the cubs was bad enough: on top of having had to develop friendships and a survival strategy for school, this was a new group where you had to find allies and evade enemies.