Free Life and Laughing: My Story by Michael McIntyre Page A

was six. I didn’t know at the time that it would take me over twenty-five years to be doing so well again.
    My parents, however, were not getting on. I know they argued a great deal, but I only really remember one row in particular. It seemed so trivial. Lucy and I could hear the yelling from our respective flats and even as little people couldn’t understand why they would be arguing over such a thing. Grapefruit. My dad was livid over the fact that there was no grapefruit for breakfast. I suppose when two people reach a point when they can’t stand each other, they argue over everything. Although remembering the Florida Hilton coffee quarrel, maybe Dad was just very argumentative at breakfast-time. It got pretty heated – I think a La Sorpresa vase may have been smashed at some point. Looking back, the way Mum was shopping in Waitrose, Temple Fortune, it’s a wonder there was any food in the house at all, let alone grapefruit.
    Parents try to protect their children, so I wasn’t fully aware of their problems. As a child, your parents are the two people you love most in the world. To hear them fighting is horribly confusing and upsetting. As I sat on the stairs listening to them arguing, I didn’t know that in just two school sports days’ time, I would have two dads in the fathers’ race (and still no Kenny Everett).

6
    I am not superstitious in any way, I don’t believe in anything supernatural or paranormal. Fortune-tellers, mediums, psychics are all, in my opinion, nonsense. I’ve watched those ‘talking to the dead’ shows, and they just don’t make any sense to me. The medium calls out common letters, ‘I’m getting a G.’
    Then several people in the audience start responding: ‘It’s Gary’, ‘It’s Gordon’, ‘It’s Grandma.’
    If the medium could talk to the dead, why are the dead only giving him the first letter of their name? This is an amazing opportunity for the dead. They must have a lot to talk about, and some pretty major information like: what happens when you die? Is there a God? What’s the meaning of life? No, apparently they would rather play some kind of afterlife version of ‘Guess Who?’ Also, the letters the medium gets are always very common, to give himself the best chance of a response. You’ll never see one of these shows when the psychic says, ‘I’m getting an “X”’, to a silent audience.
    Until a French widow stands up and says, ‘That must be Xavier!’
    When my mother lived alone in Kensington Church Street, very soon after meeting my father at his auditions, she wandered into a psychic bookshop a few doors down from her. She’d walked past it almost every day, but today found herself browsing the occult. There were Tarot card readers in the back, and, with time to kill, she was enticed into a reading. She was young, impressionable and open-minded. Rather than a mystical woman in flowing robes leaning over a small candlelit table, her reader was a relatively normal-looking man. She turned the cards over, and the card reader was immediately shocked by what he saw. My mother was a little concerned by his reaction. ‘Is everything OK?’ she enquired.
    ‘Can you just wait there a second?’ Without waiting for a response, he left her sitting there alone. She started to panic, and by the time he returned had not only convinced herself she was dying, but had doodled a ‘Will’ on a receipt from her handbag.
    The Tarot card reader had brought mystics who worked in the shop to view the cards. All four of them had similarly excitable reactions. ‘What is it?’ my mother asked.
    Her original reader spoke: ‘You are pregnant.’
    ‘I’m not,’ insisted my mum. In actual fact, she was, but didn’t know it yet. Most people find out they’re pregnant from a missed period, a home pregnancy test or a big tummy. It’s rare to learn this from a Tarot card reader in the back of a psychic bookshop.
    ‘You will have a son,’ continued one of the other