Life and Laughing by Michael McIntyre

Author:Michael McIntyre
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141969718
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2009-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

With my grandma in my Triumph Spitfire. Unfortunately she was the only female I picked up in it.

I bought my Spitfire, and she sat proudly in our Golders Green driveway while I learned to drive. Meanwhile my hair continued to grow, upwards, refusing to drop. I had to buy a bigger cap to contain it. I looked like an idiot, awful, invisible to the Woodhouse girls. But I waited patiently, knowing that soon I would remove my cap and, like a plain secretary taking off her glasses and releasing her pony-tailed hair in slow motion, I would be transformed. At home, I would take the cap off to assess my progress, but still my hair would ping upwards.

After about six months, I had to admit defeat and booked a haircut. But I didn’t want my six months of suffering to go to waste and asked the hairdresser if there was any way to keep the length and give me a style. So he cut the front and left the back long. The net result was a mullet. This was a totally inadvertent mullet. It’s not like I went in the hairdressing salon and said, ‘I want a mullet, please. I want to look like Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle when they sang “Diamond Lights” on Top of the Pops in 1987.’ I did not say that, but I may as well have.

‘Why did you keep your mullet?’ you are surely asking. Well, I didn’t know what a mullet was, my mullet was accidental, and the fact is my hair looked a lot better than it had for the last six months squashed under various caps. So, believe it or not, I thought it looked good.

This is a recurring theme of my youth. I was desperate to be attractive, so that I could attract attractive women, but I did myself no favours whatsoever. However, I still had my next throw of the dice waiting: my Spitfire. Surely when I parked this car in the parade outside Woodhouse, nestled among the Nissan Micras and Fiat Pandas, girls would see that I’m different, interesting, classy.

When I passed my driving test, I was wildly excited about my new life on the road. On my first drive into college, conditions were perfect. The skies were blue and my little sports car was sparkling in the morning sunshine. After a quick breakfast, I put the roof down and set off, slowly. I could sense the car may have some mechanical issues. There was an unidentified rattling, the distinct smell of petrol, and when I braked, it took quite a while to stop. But there was no denying my Spitfire looked splendid and was turning heads.

As I approached college, my heart raced and my engine struggled, but we were going to make it. I had timed my arrival to perfection, it was the busiest time, the road was filled with students, and every one of them stared at me in my convertible classic car as I parked directly outside college.

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