We might have been separated for our own good... well, his good anyway...
First let me just say that I've grown up as a reasonably well adjusted, vegetarian, all round nice guy. But my mother has a theory that horrid children turn into easy-going adults... and vice versa.

I treated my brother in a beastly way. When I was nearly four and he was nearly two, my mother heard a commotion upstairs and ran up to find me hard at work trying to push him out of the window. He wasn't having any of it, of course, and was fighting to stay in the bedroom, but still.... I don't know if he'd been annoying me (which he did often) or it was revenge for his lack of interest when I'd fallen head first from a climbing frame.

A year later and I'm at school where I'd worked out that you could get the sharp bit out of a plastic bodied pencil sharpener by stamping on it and picking the blade out of the remnants. Lovely. Of course, what to do with a sharp blade? Well... cut things! I tried me. That hurt. Then my brother gleefully comes bounding up to annoy me and... well, a quick flick of the blade later and thirty years later he still has a fetching little scar on his cheek. There was hell to pay for that.

Then my mum and dad separated, and I went with my dad, and bro with my mum. I thought it was because the folks couldn't stand each other, but I sometimes think they were just protecting my brother.

We get on fine now, though he still has a wary look on him if we're anywhere high, or in the kitchen....
(clopinettes, Mon 29 Dec 2008, 21:36, Reply)