Ayoade on Top

When I was six, I didn’t even know it was possible to be anywhere else. All I did was stay in the car. My parents were always in the car, going to places, getting out of the car at those places and asking me to stay in the car until they got back from those places. But they needn’t have asked. Where else would I go? It never occurred to me to leave the car. The only reason I wasn’t still in bed was because I was told it was time to get out of bed and get in the car. As an only child, I never learned to conspire, no one showed me how to rebel. I simply did not know how to transgress. I did everything I was told. My first words were, ‘Will that be all for today?’

It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I realised I didn’t have to wear the exact things my mother told me to. Finally, I could stop dressing like a cabin boy. I opted for a look which said, ‘Youth is wasted on me!’ – baggy corduroy, tucked-in checked shirts and tweed jackets. I looked like my own supply teacher.

Why, for example, didn’t we stop believin’ in infinite economic growth pre-2007? In early 2008, I had to expect that I could no longer keep up the payments on my south-east London garage share. It became apparent that seventeen people couldn’t effectively co-own a garage. And even those none of us could afford a car, meaning that we might have been able to use it for (limited) storage, once we broke the garage down into zones based on our individual contribution to the sale price, no one could enter the (tiny) space without triggering a complex border dispute. Legal fees swallowed up our investments, and some frankly vile accusations were made both in person and online. Before we knew it, some middle-class squatters had repurposed the property and turned it into a falafel nook.

Norwegian exchange gifts on Christmas Eve. I felt this was both a ruse to prevent me getting up early on Christmas morning and a way to blackmail me into a flurry of chores. My mother dismissed this as another of my deranged paranoiac fantasies, like how it was safe to outside after 5 p.m. After the last of the sauerkraut had been washed down with a quenching fraught of julebrus, we would clear the table, wipe the table, dry the table, replace the tablecloth, wipe the tablecloth, dry the tablecloth, wash the dishes, dry the dishes, put away the dishes in a cupboard, wipe the cupboard, dry the cupboard, vacuum any dust resulting from opening the cupboard, wipe the vacuum cleaner, put away the vacuum cleaner in another cupboard, wipe down and dry that cupboard, shower, dry ourselves, wash the towels, dry the towels and sit down on the freshly wiped sofa to exchange tokens of esteem. When I say ‘we’, I mean my mum and I. By this time, my dad would be asleep.