David Mitchell - David Mitchell - Back Story

But no, when it comes to celebrities moaning about their problems, they only want to hear about depression and madness. The liberal media have a tremendous bias in favour of disorders of the nervous system’s cerebral centre rather than its provincial offshoots. It’s London-centricity made anatomical and there was no shifting any TV commissioner to the Salford that is my spine.

Yet, let me tell you, back pain is a fascinating topic – as long as it’s your own. It may not be fun to think about, largely because it happens in the context of nagging back pain – it’s like trying to solve an engrossing country house murder while gradually being murdered yourself – but it’s never boring.

That was my situation in 2007. It was really worrying me. I tried everything. By which I mean, I tried some things. You can’t try everything. The world is full of evangelists – people who are convinced the answer lies in acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy, physiotherapy, cod liver oil or changing the pocket you keep your wallet in. I tried some remedies, and felt guilty that I wasn’t trying more, but also tired because the condition stopped me sleeping properly. Even Poirot’s little grey cells might have misfired if he was being occasionally bonked on the head by an invisible candlestick as he tried to address the suspects.

I took note of the things that I wanted to hear (such as ‘you can fix it by sitting on a ball’) and not the things I didn’t (such as ‘you might need a major operation’) – like you do when you’re infatuated with someone and can’t yet bring yourself to draw the dispiriting conclusion that they don’t fancy you. That would mean you’d have to start the incredibly unpleasant process of getting over them. In those circumstances – and I feel this gives an insight into the mentality of the stalker – you treasure any sign of affection or kindness and build great castles of reason around them in your mind: how could they possibly have said that, smiled then, noticed this, if they didn’t on some level return your feelings? Meanwhile you ignore the overwhelming body of evidence of their indifference and the fact that they’re often really quite pleasant to a wide range of people without that meaning they’d ever be willing to have sex with them. (More of this later.)

It’s a sign of how deep my despair became, and yet how stubbornly I avoided dealing with the subject via official medical channels because of my weird fear of doctors and hospitals, that I started sitting on a ball – and indeed that I still sit on a ball, that I’m sitting on a ball as I write this. A giant inflatable yoga ball. Apologies if that’s shattered your image of me lounging in a Jacuzzi smoking a cigar while dictating these words to an impatient and topless Hungarian supermodel. But, no, I’m perched alone on a preposterous piece of back-strengthening furniture in my bedroom in Kilburn surrounded by dusty piles of books and old souvenirs from the Cambridge Footlights.

You have no idea how greatly sitting on a ball offends me aesthetically and challenges my sense of who I am. Or maybe you do. After all, you have bought a book written by me – you’re probably aware of my tweedy image. You’ve probably guessed that all things ‘new age’ tend to make me raise a sceptical eyebrow. And a sceptical fist, which I bang sceptically on the table while wryly starting a sceptical chant of ‘Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!’ before starting sceptically to throw stuff and scream: ‘You can shove your trendy scientifically unsubstantiated bullshit up your uncynical anuses!’

To me, sitting on a ball feels a bit wind chimes. It’s got a touch of the homeopathic about it. In homeopathic terms: a massive overdose. It smacks of wheat intolerance. Which, to me, smacks of intolerance. And I’m very intolerant of it.

The other major lifestyle change I adopted was walking. That was the only thing about which there appeared to be any consensus among the people offering me advice: that walking, even if it hurt, always helped. Resting, oddly, did not. Resting oddly certainly didn’t. (Take that, Lynne Truss!) Walking was something I could do. This was so much more approachable as a solution than either the conventional medicine route (doctors, painkillers, scans, scalpels, unconsciousness) or any of the trendier alternatives, a lot of which – yoga and pilates, for example – seemed to involve going to classes.

I don’t think men can really go to yoga classes, can they? I mean, it would be weird. All the women would just think you were there in the hope of a covert ogle or to hit on them afterwards. This is what I had always suspected until I was talking to a female friend about yoga. It was a group conversation in the pub. She was extolling the virtues of her yoga classes and saying how everyone should go until one of the men present asked: ‘But wouldn’t it be weird for a man?’

She seemed surprised. She thought for a moment. Then she said: ‘Yes, you’re right. It would be really weird. I was just recommending it because I go and I like it. But, no, of course if a man turned up, we’d all assume he was a pervert.’

But you seldom get called a pervert just for walking, unless you’re naked and circling a primary school. So I started to walk, first for half an hour and then for an hour every day, and let me tell you it has cured my back. I get the occasional niggle, but then, who doesn’t? But it doesn’t feel fragile any more and I can bend down without having to take a few minutes to plan.

That’s the main advantage. There’s a secret other one, which is that I’ve lost about two stone in weight. But that’s incidental. I refuse to let myself be pleased about it. Or rather I’m in total denial of how pleased I am about it. I don’t want to think of myself as that vain – or to admit that I’d even noticed the lamentable chubbiness that encroached over successive Peep Show series. If it made me a bit trimmer, that’s a happy accident. Not even that, an irrelevant accident. I’m not the sort of person to care about that sort of thing: I don’t go to gyms or diet. I fear that calorie counting, if I ever tried it, would be a short hop from powdering my wig, dousing myself in scent and speaking French to passers-by. I just take a daily constitutional. In a British sort of way.

And it turns out that I like walking. I find it relaxing – differently from, if not necessarily more than, watching television. It gives me some time to think, without the self-consciousness of having set aside some time to think. I find I’m more aware of the weather and the seasons and I have a much greater knowledge of the city I live in. If ignorance of one-way systems and not having a driving licence weren’t a handicap, I’d be able to qualify as a taxi driver.

In this book, I’ll take you on one of my walks – and I promise I won’t go on about my back. It’s a walk through my life, really, but I’ll try to point out some of the notable London landmarks along the way so you can use it as a travel guide if you prefer. But it’s basically a weight-loss manual.

- 1 - Contents Cover Title Page Dedication For VC (M) Introduction 1 The Fawlty Towers Years 2 Inventing Fleet Street 3 Light-houses, My Boy! 4 Summoning Servants 5 The Pianist and the Fisherman 6 Death of a Monster 7 Civis Britannicus Sum 8 The Mystery of the Unexplained Pole 9 Beatings and Crisps 10 The Smell of the Crowd 11 Cross-Dressing, Cards and Cocaine 12 Presidents of the Galaxy 13 Badges 14 Play It Nice and Cool, Son 15 Teenage Thrills: First Love, and the Rotary Club Public Speaking Competition 16 Where Did You Get That Hat? 17 I Am Not a Cider Drinker 18 Enthusiasm in Basements 19 God Is Love 20 The Cause of and Answer to All of Life’s Problems 21 Attention 22 Mitchell and Webb 23 We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back 24 The Lager’s Just Run Out 25 Real Comic Talent 26 Going Fishing 27 Causes of Celebration 28 The Magician 29 Are You Sitting Down? 30 Peep Show 31 Being Myself 32 Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam 33 The Work–Work Balance 34 The End of the Beginning 35 Centred Picture Section Copyright About the Publisher