Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [15]
One dinnertime, while enjoying a beef broth vegetable medley compote, I addressed my parents: ‘This living room situation is a joke. Why don’t you sub-let it? I was chatting to a girl at playgroup, and she says her parents do the same thing. Maybe we could solve the homeless problem if we, as a nation, open up our unused front rooms? We’d have to kick them out on Christmas Day, but the rest of the year would be good for them. And that’s another thing. If it’s just a “Christmas room”, why don’t you leave the Christmas tree and decorations up all year? And why have you got so many plants in such a dark room, have you never heard of photosynthesis? What kind of people are you?’
Unfortunately, my rant sounded more like an episode of Pingu, and my dad just muttered, ‘We should go back to the doctor, his speech isn’t improving at all.’
My parents’ actual room was not out of bounds. Every morning my sister and I would climb into our parents’ bed. I would always go on our dad’s side and Lucy would always go on our mum’s side. I don’t know why it was always this way round. All I know is that, with all due respect to my father, I got the bum draw, almost literally. We must have been very young at this time; in fact this might rival Poo-gate as my earliest memory. I love cuddling my two boys but seldom wonder what the experience might be like for them. They are little, soft and wonderful. I am not.
Well, I vividly recall these early-morning cuddles with my dad. Not only was he a big naked hairy man, but his mouth was about the size of my little head. I will never forget his hot cigarettey breath blasting into my tiny face. At regular intervals, my hair would be blown horizontal as I would try to avoid it, like Keanu Reeves avoiding bullets in the Matrix trilogy.
My dad and me eating breakfast in bed – the scene of his morning-breath cuddles.
Morning breath (something I have discussed at length in stand-up) is bad enough – cigarettes certainly don’t improve things. Occasionally my father would be sipping coffee in bed. The combination of morning breath, cigarette breath and coffee breath became almost lethal. I think he was one garlic clove away from actually killing me. I would peek over to the other side, where Lucy and my mother were enjoying day-beginning cuddles and then return to my father’s life-threatening monster breath blowing a gale into my face. Come to think of it, maybe this is what was affecting my vocal cords. Maybe my morning dad cuddles also shaped the way I look. Nowadays I always look a bit windswept and squinting, which is exactly how I would have looked in the eye of his breath-storm.
My dad was a heavy smoker. Outside of his wives and children, the two great loves of his life were Marlboro and Camel. He began smoking as a twelve-year-old in Montreal when, believe it or not, smoking was encouraged for health reasons. Then, your ‘five a day’ referred to cigarettes. It was as if he smoked every minute of the day. Remember in those days there were no restrictions on smoking. So he’d be smoking in restaurants, on aeroplanes, in cinemas, on the bus, on the Tube. He was smoking when he said his marriage vows, he smoked while sleeping and when he swam underwater. My dad never managed to quit.
I myself started smoking as a teenager and smoked about a pack of Marlboro Lights a day until my mid-twenties. Giving up was one of the biggest achievements of my life. I read Allen Carr’s book How to Stop Smoking and would recommend it to anybody trying to kick the filthy habit. In fact, I have recommended it many times, including to a very sweet, chain-smoking former tour manager of mine who then accidentally read Alan Carr’s Look Who It Is!, the 2008