Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [62]
So this tremendously embarrassing misunderstanding is how I introduced myself to the class. People were confused by me, as if I was an alien from the Planet Posh. That didn’t really change much as people got to know me. Woodhouse was all about cliques. The mass of differences I witnessed arriving on my first day soon turned into groups. There were probably more, but the ones I remember are: ‘The Goths’, ‘The Asians’, ‘The Jews’, ‘The Rockers’, ‘The Greeks’, ‘The Geeks’ and me. Initially I joined ‘The Asians’ (maybe it was my Clarins fake tan).
They auditioned me for their clique by inviting me out to lunch. At lunch, most people went to North Finchley High Road. I suggested PizzaExpress. They laughed. We went to the kebab shop and bonded over doners. A week previously I was at a school like Hogwarts but without the magic, and now here I was eating kebabs with Dilip, Chirag, Ammet and Jeet on North Finchley High Road. I felt out of place in both settings. I always felt out of place, but at least I was in a new place, and the kebabs were amazing.
Not long after I started at Woodhouse, it was Valentine’s Day, the day for lovers and for wannabe lovers to make their intentions known. Valentine’s cards are traditionally sent anonymously, signed with a question mark. Great lot of use that is – you have no idea who fancies you; for all you know it’s the Riddler from Batman. My new college was filled with posturing boys and blushing girls waiting to make a move on each other. This was the perfect opportunity.
An internal post bag was set up for students to send each other cards. I wasn’t particularly hopeful of receiving any, but when the bag arrived for my class on Valentine’s morning, it was so overflowing I thought I might be in with a shout. As it turned out, every single card, and there must have been close to a hundred, was addressed to the same guy. The school stud, Karim Adel. He accepted his teen heartthrob status with nonchalance and even handed out some of the cards for his fellow classmates to open on his behalf. I opened a few and they didn’t just contain question marks, they were shockingly graphic essays of desire.
I didn’t understand it. I looked closely at Karim; I needed to be like him. What did he have that I didn’t? Well, for a start, he was Iranian. There was nothing I could do about my heritage. We were of similar height, similar build, I definitely had better teeth, but the main difference was his shoulder length hair. In fact, one of the saucier cards I read made several references to Karim’s hair. So I decided to grow my hair and imagined myself one year on when the next Valentine’s postbag was delivered. Karim and I would be sitting next to each other with our long hair intertwining and bathing in a sea of Valentine’s cards addressed to us.
Growing your hair isn’t easy. Because hair grows upwards, you have to wait until it reaches a certain length and weight before gravity kicks in and it falls nicely over your shoulders – ‘Because I’m worth it!’ Before that, it will look unkempt and unattractive – ‘Because I’m not worth it!’ During this difficult middle phase, I bought a cap and squashed my overgrown hair inside. Soon the cap couldn’t contain the growing locks and they would sprout out of the back and on the sides. When I removed the cap, my hair would shoot up vertically.
While I was waiting for my hair to grow, a new opportunity to attract girls presented itself. I had started driving lessons and on one of her Sunday visits, my grandmother announced she wanted to give me some money to buy my first car. She was like a fruit machine: every once in a while you’d hit the jackpot. She gave me £2,000 to buy whatever car I wanted. I was so excited. My own car. Freedom. Every day I scanned the pages of Loot, Autotrader and What Car? to find my dream set of wheels.
Quite a few of the students had their own cars and drove to college. They would park adjacent to the school in a parade of the worst vehicles on the road, like a queue for the crusher at the car pound.