Marmalade and brotherly love ( for B and M ) 

When I got my Mums old  jam pan down from the shelf this morning in order to make marmalade, I suddenly realised that I couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like anymore. And this got me thinking about family and the bonds that tie us together.

When we were kids there was a radiator in my bedroom which made a weird clicking noise that started off quickly and  gradually faded to nothing. This was obviously something to do with the water pressure. However when you are six you will believe anything your older brother tells you. He convinced  me that a little monkey lived inside it with a pile of stones and that he spent  his nights tapping these stones with a tiny hammer. Another  snippet was that the best way to get rid of a mosquito when it crept up on you was to growl at it like an angry lion. And that if you threw your pocket money over the fence it would come back. Wrong. It just gets lost in the bushes. 

My brother loved insects as much as  I hated them. His particular favourites were cicadas, monstrous bejewelled creatures that sat on the verandah mesmerised by the lights , making them very easy to catch. He used to collect dead ones and keep them in an old Black Magic tin. Now there were two of these tins in  our family. One was  innocently full of photographs and his, the box of horrors, a collection of  decaying greying wings and bodies. More than once he fooled me into thinking I was opening  the one full of photos and then realising too late that I wasn’t. I remember him weeping with laughter once when a cockroach actually flew off the curtains ON TO MY HEAD. A bit like when cats make a beeline for the one person in the room who really hates them. Of all the heads in all the rooms..

His piece de resistance was to hang cicadas from pieces of cotton and dangle them over the banisters so that effectively I was trapped on the middle landing, unable to go back  upstairs or down. Looking back on it I must have been pretty good comedy value and to be honest I can’t really blame him, but I have to admit to shuddering at the thought of the contents of that tin, even now. 

And now we are both grown up and have children of our own who themselves are grown up and all have their own versions of nightmare tins and horror stories and made up stories between them. Like my lot believing that Jeremy next door actually did eat a slug and that Jonny is half Italian. And that I really did find a bear in the allotment on April fools day.

When I first met my half brother  M I was already an adult with three small children. And M looked like Eric Cantona and was wild and lovely and we just knew we belonged to the same tribe. My fearless little brother. I cant imagine what life would have been like had we grown up together,  but imagine it would have been of the I dare you to jump off that cliff and how long can you lie in the middle of the road or cuddle a seal variety. 

During our first week together L made us both sit down at the table in silence and listen to a recording he had made of one of the last surviving foghorns, I can’t  remember where it was from but may well have been off Arran. A great mournful yearning boom of a sound, comforting as felt slippers. Some people might think this was rather a strange thing to do. But for me, on that first visit,  it seemed perfectly wonderfully exactly right.