Lego mate


Perhaps it was yet another mopey lonely moment; perhaps it was yet another bus journey after a day in the zoo that I call work; but all of a sudden I realised how much I'd always wanted an older brother.
Perhaps it's a wish for protection and unconditional lenience.
Perhaps it's another badly digested Electra complex.
But everything would have been so much less frightening with some other guide to growing up than a sneering mother.

For one thing, I would have had help learning to ride that stupid bicycle and might not have ended in the compost heap.
I would probably have had warning about lifting the latch on the pigsty at the grandparents' farm. Older brothers know that when pigs are let out they cause a lot of damage. And it would have been so much easier to build those damn tree houses than on my own, and maybe I wouldn’t have had that unfortunate accident with a plank, a 9” nail and my right foot.

Because of our age difference, I left home without ever being any kind of a proper sister to my younger brother. I often feel that, perhaps, if I'd been there more, he wouldn't have taken the way out, out of loneliness and lack of help with tree houses, pigsties and compost heaps. He knew everything about the politics and economic situation of Guatemala, but he never knew how to ride a bike. I bet he wished he'd had an older sister.

I now share a house with a genius boy who knows little about tree houses but a lot about all sorts of genius stuff. He enters Lego competitions and delivers lectures in audio synthesis in universities. He watches cartoons and stays up all night writing computers programmes that no-one's even thought about yet. Thanks to him things are a little less frightening. Sometimes I can even feel the Unconditional settle in. He never sneers.
And now, if you'll excuse me, we have a Lego police station to build in the living room. The parcel arrived on Friday. It might take a couple of hours.