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a big thing of it and said, ‘You’re surely going to discourage her.’ And I said, ‘There is absolutely no way I would discourage this.’ And I, hand on heart, wanted you to do what you wanted to, because my mother banged on about how she wanted me to be a hairdresser. She was going to buy a shop and I would do hair, and she would tell everybody. And it got to such a stage that I dreaded the time to leave school because I thought I’m going to have to tell her, but she would just think it was just a phase I was going through and all of a sudden I would want to do hair.

      IAIN STIRLING

      And the weirdest thing about it is she’s doing all that because she wants you to do well, do you know what I mean?

      ALISON STIRLING

      I think she just thought that this is something she could do for me, so instead of asking, instead of letting me find what I wanted to do, it was just, ‘This is the thing.’ And I remember I would go through hoops to try not to hurt her in any way by saying, ‘There is not a hope in hell that I will ever be a hairdresser.’

      IAIN STIRLING

      I’m never doing a blue rinse in my life.

      ALISON STIRLING

      I could not. I’m not artistic and the thought of standing with somebody’s hair and doing something with that, no. It just was not on the cards for me. That was never going to happen, so I think I realised from an early age that you’re going to get on so much further if you do what you want to do. If you make the wrong decision, it’s your decision. You do it.

      IAIN STIRLING

      Yeah.

      ALISON STIRLING

      If somebody else makes the decision it’s so easy to then say, and I’ve heard all this with friends, ‘Oh, my parents made me do this.’ And what they get is not a chip on their shoulder – it’s a boulder. So your doing comedy was absolutely not an issue. People in the law school would say, ‘Oh, for goodness sake, why is he not doing this?’

      IAIN STIRLING

      Because he thinks it’s the most boring thing that’s ever happened in his entire life.

      ALISON STIRLING

      Yeah, or they’d say, ‘You’ll be disappointed,’ and I’m going, ‘No, I would never be disappointed,’ because part of me knows that if you wanted to do it, you would apply yourself because that’s what you chose to do and, to be fair, when you did your first sketch at school, I mean, you just loved it. You came alive in that. You never came alive in law school.

      IAIN STIRLING

      As you know I studied with very, very clever men, in that they all went on to do amazing things – Samoa, Hong Kong, they’ve been everywhere with the law. They’d go and speak to the dissertation adviser and all that, and it wasn’t that I was lazy and didn’t do it. It just never dawned on me that it was an option because I was never that into it. So I was trying really hard, but I think the thing about being passionate about something is that you’re going to work hard at it by default because you’re thinking about it all the time.

      ALISON STIRLING

      Exactly.

      IAIN STIRLING

      Like even if I go out and get absolutely hammered, and it happens more often than it should, I’ll lie in in the morning and write a funny bit of stand-up. Well, not even write it, I’ll just think it and I’ll have a thing for stand-up so I’ve done work that morning, whereas with law I didn’t like it. So I had to drag myself into that library and force my way through all those books. So I was not as good at it just because I wasn’t into it.

      ALISON STIRLING

      And I think that’s the thing. I’ve definitely learned that from Mum. When I didn’t go into hairdressing there had to be these excuses because she’d told so many people, and I did fine. Like you, I applied myself in what I wanted to and I did well and that’s fine. I wouldn’t have done well in the hairdressers. I would have been absolutely miserable.

      IAIN STIRLING

      You would have hated it.

      ALISON STIRLING

      I would have hated it. Well, you never know, I might not have.

      IAIN STIRLING

      You’d be good at chatting to people, the people bit.

      ALISON STIRLING

      Yeah, the chat is one thing. But what about the haircut?

      IAIN STIRLING

      Well, I had a lovely chat but I’ve not got an ear. Apart from that …

      ALISON STIRLING

      And the hair. I’m not sure what this is supposed to be.

      THE ANTIGUA FUCK-UP (PART II)

      So, back in Antigua, the whole Stirling clan are staring at a stranger’s ding-dong. Like an X-rated Gogglebox. I’d say everyone was watching on in horror, but that isn’t actually true. Mother was doing that classic middle-class British thing of just pretending that the horrific event unfolding five feet from her head wasn’t happening. It’s a real British talent, acting completely indifferent as horror unfolds all around. So as this man urinated next to Gran, Mother started showing the family the many interesting functions of the rental car: ‘Oh, look, you press this button and the lights come on. The CD goes in and if you press here it comes straight back out.’

      I, as the son and the man I was slowly becoming, failed in my challenge to step up and deal with the situation myself. So it fell to Gran. After a long pause and a few more buttons pressed by Mum, my gran declared loudly: ‘Look how black it is.’

      Now, for the record, I am fully aware that this is a totally unacceptable, offensive thing to say. And everyone was offended by the statement – except me. Because I wasn’t looking at the guy outside our rental car; I was looking at my gran, who wasn’t looking at the man either. She was staring out the opposite side of the car, into the sky, at a massive rain cloud. This gave me the opportunity to finally save my family. I wasn’t an alpha who could take control – I had been too mollycoddled by my loving parents to take any action that didn’t involve their direct support and encouragement – but what I could do was be funny. So, with my parents still in utter shock and disgust at the situation that was unfolding, I said: ‘Hey Nanna, want to stand underneath it and I’ll get a photo?’

      My gran’s reply was almost instant: ‘Pass me my umbrella.’

      At which point Mum just panicked and shot off. She went from awkward Brit abroad to bank-job getaway driver in two sentences. It was a beautiful thing to watch as my mum sliced through the thick drizzle (from the clouds, not the penis), jumping red lights like she was trying to drive away from her own shame and embarrassment. It’ll not work, Mum, because Gran’s in the back. After a minute or so, and with my parents still totally oblivious to the whole cloud situation, my gran said: ‘I’ve not seen one that big since your grandad passed away.’

      What a lovely moment. God bless you, Nanna.

      CHAPTER 2

       SCHOOLED

      ‘The Best Days of Your Life …’

      School years, love them or hate them, one thing is for sure: they will leave an indelible mark on your psyche that takes a fair bit to shift. Doesn’t matter if it’s the jock that never quite grew up and accepted that after school no one gives a flying fuck about you having captained the football team that got to the semi-finals of the Scottish schools cup or that once you got to second base with the prom queen. Or the poor bastard that spent his life getting picked on by cowards who were just glad it wasn’t them receiving

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