The comedian talks about his family

Nick McGrath
Source: The Guardian >> Read full article and comment

The comedian David Mitchell. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

My roots are resolutely suburban. My parents were hotel managers until I was two, and then we moved from Salisbury, where I was born, to Oxford where my dad started teaching hotel management, which my mum also started doing a few years later when I was a bit older. ­Basically, I had a middle-class upbringing in Oxford where we lived in a suburban house on a suburban street and then we moved to a slightly larger suburban house on another suburban street where my brother was born. Staggeringly middle class.

To all intents and purposes I was an only child until the age of seven, when my brother was born. I wasn’t jealous when he arrived, but it definitely changed the family dynamic. Initially it was a bit of a blow but I didn’t blame him. I do think we have a different relationship to siblings who are closer in age. He was a baby for ages and then he was a ­toddler, and by the time I went to university he was still very much a little boy, so I was away when he became a man. We had to start our ­relationship again in the sense of me realising, oh, he’s now an adult and we can go to the pub as two adults… Continue reading