PINT OF MILK
MARK GATISS
ILLUSTRATION ARN0
Have you ever knowingly broken the law?
I don’t think so. I was always a very good boy. I lived in terror of what we used to call in the North-east “getting wrong”. That’s not a phrase that has moved anywhere else. “I got wrong for that.” So largely, no. Oh — that’s not true, I broke the law when I was a kid. Because when I was a teenager, I had sex with another man before I turned 21. And in those days that was illegal. That was a thrill. And that was an act of political rebellion, which was very important to do in those days.
Do you have a nickname?
I did at school. And I was very proud of it, because the headmaster gave it to me. He called me ‘Merlin’, because he said I was a “wizard with words”. I’ve never forgotten that. That was like being knighted. It stuck with me. I don’t know if anybody else called me that. They just called me ‘twat’.