Free David Mitchell: Back Story by David Mitchell

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 settled 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