HOW well do we really know our siblings? How much of our relationship with them is tainted by the past? My younger sister still calls me ‘evil' for inviting her to smell Woodleigh Green Apple shampoo and then to take a swig when she was about six-years-old.

By a weird quirk of fate, lockdown sees me living with my recently-returned-from-London younger brother. This, I can report, is providing endless reams of material for that sitcom I may yet write.

Every day I am finding out or rediscovering aspects of his personality and character. He was despatched to university in London in 1985. Once he graduated he took a succession of corporate jobs, always too busy to visit the homeland. Similarly, after I graduated I threw myself in my career, too. We’ve always got on, but face to face time over the years has been limited.

Life before lockdown was good for me. As a working single parent, I had waved goodbye to little kids, had a great two-day a week job that fascinated and challenged me and was selfishly enjoying the single life. I had joined a gym, had a perfectly clean and tidy house, reconnected with old friends, travelled to new places and was enjoying clubbing again, and maybe even thinking about finding that perfect man.

Suddenly came lockdown and my 50-year-old brother came with it – all 6ft 3in of him in a tiny house made for small folk, alongside my hulking teenager, no stranger to the upper end of the measuring tape either.

This was a jolt to the system. And it has been for the last two long weeks. The actual swishing puddles on the bathroom floor alert me to the fact he’s had a shower, the sticky handles on the fridge tell me he’s put honey on his cereal, then gone to the fridge to get the milk, and the sudden increase in Marks & Spencer's reduced items – some 12 at the last count – remind me of the fact my wee bro is in the house.

The boy who always loved a bargain has become the man who will buy large chocolate Swiss rolls, and sticky toffee puddings, four of them, for 60p each, without thinking how three of us are going to eat them all in the six hours before they go out of date.

Instead they are met with a steely glare from me, on my perpetual diet, and the hardened stare of his 18-year-old nephew who has taken to examining all the food in the fridge declaring it ‘fit or unfit’ for consumption.

“Your brother is the actual antithesis of me,” he informs me officiously. “If I see reduced stickers I think 'steer clear’, but your brother takes a perverse pleasure in snapping these up! I’m banning him from shopping.”

As it happens his uncle can no longer go to the shops anyway, having received an email from the NHS saying he is on the high risk category due to a pre-existing lung condition, so in one way, a crisis was averted.

Living with big sister during lockdown and the high risk thing has, I think, made my brother more childlike. It’s like we are back in our semi in one of Glasgow’s suburbs where I used to protect him from the ice-cream van man who told him to “bugger off and not come back” apparently because he was taking too long to decide what sweets he wanted to buy. (Now I’m thinking my brother was actually trying to locate a bargain and that’s why he was told to get lost).

My role, once again, is to shield him, this time from an invisible menace – coronavirus. But he’s taken the childlike thing too far. Suddenly he can’t make his own bed, fold his towel properly or wash and iron his clothes. Last week, whilst I was on a work Zoom call with colleagues in Manchester, he marched into the room, towel precariously pulled around his waist in more or less full view of the assorted bosses and declared in his best 10-year-old child’s voice: “Uzma! There’s no pants!”

It took me back to the room we shared in that semi when, aged two, I’d climbed into his cot, pulled him out when he was crying and changed his nappy – pins and all.

Some things never change, and three weeks of lockdown with my brother have reminded me of that.

 

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