The Life of Lee by Lee Evans

yearned to be what I wasn’t. I wish, for example, that I’d had more girlfriends. Not now, obviously – my wife would kill me! – but growing up. Perhaps my life would have somehow turned out differently if I’d been better-looking and known exactly what to say to a woman. But so bad was I with the opposite sex that I’d more or less given up on trying to acquire a girlfriend by the time I was into my late teens.
    I wish I’d had more confidence too. I’ve always been an insecure person. I was a nervous child, suffering from eczema that would flare up whenever I got anxious. Inaddition, I wish I cared less about other people’s feelings. That problem has dogged me my whole life. My wife has always complained that whenever we’ve been round to someone’s house, I will spend the next three days agonizing over how I might have said the wrong thing or reacted inappropriately to something, even to the extent that I want to phone them up and apologize.
    On occasions, I have sent letters or even sneaked out of the house without my wife knowing, driven back to the supposedly offended person’s house and tried to say sorry. Of course, the poor, baffled ‘victim’ I’m trying to explain all this to has no idea what the hell this loon is going on about as he rants away on his front lawn.
    ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve just got to apologize for what I said the other night,’ I’d say.
    ‘What the fuck are you talking about, you tosser?’ he’d reply. ‘Do you realize it’s five o’clock in the morning? I’m calling the police now!’
    As you can tell, ineptitude has been my constant companion. A lot of my earliest memories revolve around sport – or at least my total inability to do it. My rubbishness on the sports field of course only served to intensify my sense of being one of life’s losers.
    But you couldn’t fault my enthusiasm. Ever since that doctor handed me one of those lollipops for the last time and finally gave me the all-clear that my heart had healed over, I haven’t stopped running, jumping, diving and making sure I generally fall all over the place. Anyone who has seen my live show will know what I mean.
    Once I had broken free from the chains that hadconstricted me for so long and I was allowed to run, I sprinted everywhere. We couldn’t afford running shoes, so we had what we called ‘daps’, cheap shoes from the Bata shoe shop. I would even run to the hall to put them on quickly in the morning. Then I’d run out the door and didn’t stop running until I came back for my tea that night. At long last, I was able to be as physical as I liked.
    But it still didn’t make me any better at sport.
    To me, sport always felt like another obstacle, another excuse to be left out. One might think that of all the sports in the world, there would have to be at least one I could do. But there really isn’t, not even welly-throwing, although I do now realize that it’s best to take them off first before throwing them. Alas, I seem to have the unfortunate trait of what you might call physical Tourette’s when it comes to any sporting activity.
    I have literally been thrown off or out of more football fields, snooker halls, golf courses, darts games, fishing lakes, cricket pitches, sports halls, running tracks, ski slopes and ice-skating rinks than I could shake a stick at – and I probably wouldn’t even be able to do that. I was once chucked out of a dog track for jumping the fence and making a dive for that rabbit. And just in case there are any dogs reading this, a good tip is, when that bell goes and the gate is released, run around the track the opposite way to all the other dogs and don’t be freaked out when you eventually find the rabbit is suddenly running towards you.
    My very first encounter with sport was miserable and it never really got any better. Sports day was always a particular disaster. To compensate for my inadequacy, I’dstand in the sack at the start of the sack race and, as