Improbable research…

I used to like and admire Lucy Mangan's work in the Guardian. What a shame she's fallen for this:

Why sisters are good for you

A new report adds to the evidence that having sisters benefits your mental health.

No matter whether the sister is younger or older, or the age difference between you, they increase wellbeing and even your penchant for doing good deeds in the world – above and beyond that which even loving parents manage to promote.

Most of the reports suggest that it is girls' greater capacity for emotional expression that provides most of the benefits to the family that has them. 

Nonsense. I say this as the brother of four sisters (I have a brother too). Four sisters with very, very quick tempers. Family legend has it that one sister shoved another through a sheet of plate glass for wearing her socks. They didn't speak after that, despite sharing a room for several more years. 'Emotional expression' is all very well when it's soppy lovey-dovey stuff - when it's raging, grudge-holding hatred, perhaps a degree of repression is a positive thing.

Good for my mental health? Not really. I could never keep up with who wasn't speaking to whom in any particular hour. I spent my childhood looking for somewhere quiet to read. Or prematurely ending fractious games by hoiking the ball as far as possible and sloping off. 

I'm the oldest: I got the blame for anything they did, and bore the brunt of classic hardline old-fashioned violent parenting. As each sibling appeared, the parents either wearily gave up or worked out where they'd gone wrong, and relaxed considerably, until the youngest had a life of ease and luxury. Bah! 

Of course, we love each other dearly now. Now, that is, we don't see each other too often!

So today's Friday conundrum: what are the worst, and best, things your siblings ever did for you, and you for them? Do wish you had more or fewer (or any) siblings?

My sister, the author

It turns out that I'm not the only member of my family desperate to inflict his or her views on an unsuspecting public. My Dublin sister has been moonlighting as a journalist for a few years, and now she's had a personal column published in the Irish Sunday Independent, detailing her sense of liberation and discovery of a new set of values after living as a classic Irish materialist hedonist for most of the last decade. She quit her job in the middle of Ireland's massive economic collapse and looks forward to a simpler life (funded by either unemployment benefit, cheques from the media, or possibly by her bloke, who is one of the loveliest blokes with whome you could ever down a pint).

How do I feel about this? Simple things first - I'm far from being a fan of that particular paper, and this kind of column isn't what I naturally turn to. Most of all though, I'm proud: the girl can write.

It does, however, raise some interesting points. Reading about someone I think I know so well is bound to be unsettling. It's like seeing a painting through an opaque window: the general outline is what you expect, but the details are unrecognisable. Why? Firstly, because we never truly know each other, whatever the relationship. How siblings (or friends) understand each other is shaped by the dynamics of our shared past - Maura and I are 4 years and a sibling apart (I have four sisters and a brother). We got on well as younger kids, then lost shared interests in the ensuing years, before rediscovering commonalities in the more recent past, despite - or because - not seeing each other very often. My memories and understanding of her, and hers of mine, can never fit the way we understand ourselves. Part of becoming an adult is letting go of these fixed prospects, of encountering our loved ones as they wish to present themselves, or as they are. The loss of shared experience is replaced by the richness of our separate lives - there's always something new to learn when we meet again, unencumbered (hopefully) by distant rivalries and resentments. Refounding a blood relationship in friendship is surely a significant moment.

Added to this, of course, is the plain fact that we edit ourselves for public consumption: the Maura Byrne bylined in this piece is a fictional construct, just as the Plashing Vole you see in the lecture hall, the pub or on a blog is merely a facet of a shifting collection of attitudes, beliefs, positions and cells. This isn't criticism, merely observation: the concept of the individual as a stable, discrete unit is a product of western rationalist capitalism - my take on it is simple poststructuralism. 'Maura Byrne' the journalist is no more and no less true than Maura Byrne my sister - and the demands on the columnist is that the art is closer to the surface.

The result is that, ten years ago, the Vole who read of his sister's 'voracious' consumption of culture and art would have scoffed and sarcastically offered an alternative narrative. The Vole of now accepts that these claims reflect a life I haven't recently shared, an interpretation equally, if not more, valid than mine, which of course reflects the tensions and experiences of childhood.

So - to my sister the author: congratulations and admiration.