Back Story Page 0,45

in stage directions. I sat there, night after night, filling page after page, gaining satisfaction merely from there being more of it, with no thought of it ever being staged or even read. No wonder my parents encouraged me to join the cubs.

Family: Yes, I had a family, who loved me and whom I took completely for granted. My brother Daniel was born when I was seven and a half, which was an event I was more or less against to be perfectly honest. His arrival was an unsettling experience. I was too old to display a toddler’s resentment that my place at the centre of the universe had been supplanted, but I still experienced those feelings.

Years later, when I was best man at his wedding, this is what I said about it in my speech:

Unlike most best men, I can take the story of the groom right back to the beginning. Well, almost. I’m not going to start discussing my parents’ love life of the early ’80s. That never goes well on occasions such as these. But I do remember when I was told, at the age of seven, that I was soon going to have a

little brother or sister. I think my parents were concerned about what my reaction would be because they presented the news as if it was an event entirely designed to please me.

‘You know how you like having friends round to play? And you get annoyed that that can’t happen more often?’ they said. ‘Well, soon there’ll be someone for you to play with all the time!’

I was good at maths. I did a quick calculation. This sibling, I reasoned, was still some months away and I was getting older all the time. So, when this new person was nought, I would be seven and a half. When I was nine, he would be one and a half.

‘Someone for me to play with?!’ I exclaimed to my parents. ‘I don’t play with people who are six! People who are eight don’t play with me! How long will it be before he can talk?’

‘A year and a half,’ ventured my mother.

A year and a half?! That was more time than I could imagine. And presumably, even then, my one-and-a-half-year-old brother wouldn’t exactly be a sophisticated conversationalist. It appeared that my parents’ well-meaning ‘get David a friend to play with’ scheme was hopelessly ill thought-through.

‘Is there any way it can be stopped?’ I asked. I must be one of the few best men ever to have toasted the marriage of a man he initially advocated aborting.

That’s not to say I didn’t love him as soon as he arrived. I did. I worried about him. I wanted to protect him. It would have been awful if anything had happened to him. That all came naturally to me. But I’m afraid I had the imagination to realise that, had Dan never existed, I logically wouldn’t be able to miss him – and neither would I have had to deal with all the changes to our circumstances: the noise, the nappies, the tiredness of my parents, the necessity of moving house. I resented all this even if I didn’t resent him for it.

And I had a strong sense that the standards my parents expected of their offspring were dropping. He seemed to get away with stuff that I didn’t (even when making allowances for infancy – I wasn’t envious of his right to shit on the go). For example, I was pretty convinced that I was never allowed to draw on the walls. When going round the supermarket with Dan and my mum, he would be given a packet of crisps to eat for which we had not yet paid. And we had to leave Santa Claus: the Movie halfway through because he was screaming blue murder. I still don’t know how that ends.

But I hope you’ve inferred from the fact that I was later to be best man at his wedding that our relationship improved after that. By the time he was five, I was properly pleased he was there. I realised I’d be lonely without him. By the time he was 11, I was leaving home and sorry to be abandoning him. Not that he needed my help with our parents, of course. They let him draw on the bloody walls.

Dan still lives in Oxford, where he works for a hedge fund as their ‘official historian’. I don’t know what he tells them other than that, in