Someone Else's Back Story
I've been reading David Mitchell's memoir, Back Story . The funny David Mitchell. Not the Cloud Atlas guy. The framework of the story is this: David has a bad back so he goes on long walks around London because apparently that helps with bad backs and, as he strolls, the sights he sees trigger memories, which he then recounts. This book was first published in 2012 but I didn't know that. Imagine, then, my pleasure when, having written and published Spine my memoir about a bad back and how I attempted to cure it, a famous, funny man off the telly had already written that book, thirteen years earlier. Well, isn't that just wizard! I needn't have worried. There's bugger all about his back in the book. We find out it is bad but we don't find what he's done to it. The back is just bad. Perhaps it was born bad. It's just a malevolent back, his evil twin, born with Mitchell but set against him from the off, a muscle-adjacent Moriarty, the Skelator He Man...
