This Is Your Life by John O'Farrell Page A

against the Holy Roman Empire.
    Unlike me, my brother had always achieved to order. A good degree followed by a good job, a nice flat; married a nice wife, two lovely children now living happily in a lovely house. It wasn’t fair. Why wasn’t Mum shouting through from the kitchen, ‘Nicholas! Let Jimmy have a turn with the nice life now!’ As children we had niggled and bickered and fought like any two inmates sharing a small cell, and I lost every encounter. He was stronger, smarter, more experienced, more confident and just plain older than me. There had been a period when his ascendancy had been very directly expressed. For about a year and a half, I do not think Nicholas ever once broke wind unless he had first tracked me down, forcibly pinned me to the ground and sat upon my head, where his fart would finally be detonated with a triumphant ‘Yes!’ For eighteen grim months it was only in these precise circumstances that he deemed it right and proper to break wind: when his bum was pressed as close to the head of his little brother as possible. He would save them up, search the house and garden for me, then suddenly wrestle me to the ground, place his posterior on my head and release a methane blast while I struggled and protested underneath him. Sometimes my day would begin with this animal brutality. I would be awoken, not with a gentle kiss from mother, not with the melodic birdsong drifting in from an English country garden, but with a loud bottom burp blasted right into my eardrum at point-blank range, followedby the delighted cackling of my older brother.
    For an outsider to our society looking for clues as to the pecking order in this particular social grouping, I’d say that my big brother’s version of wind power might well indicate his supremacy over me. If you were observing a meeting of the council of European ministers and trying to discern who had status over whom, this sort of tell-tale body language would definitely point you in the right direction.
    â€˜Hmmm, they’re both speaking French, but which countries do they represent?’
    â€˜Ah look, that minister has just leapt up, grappled the other delegate to the ground and farted on his head. So the bloke on top must be France and the one underneath must be Luxembourg.’
    My brother was indisputably the boss, the master, the führer. Mao said that power comes out of the end of a gun. In our family power came out of my brother’s bottom.
    Of course, this ritual humiliation only took place due to the breakdown of the
pax parentis
– the real power brokers in our family did nothing to safeguard the human rights of the weaker sibling under their supposed safekeeping. I might try to protest and wail, ‘Mum! Nicholas farted on my head again!’ but somehow this made me party to a disgusting act for which it seemed I shared responsibility.
    â€˜Stop fighting, both of you! It’s disgusting. You’re both as bad as each other!’
    I felt then and I would still humbly maintain today that we were not ‘as bad as each other’. He was the farter and I was the fartee. And to have your head used as a fart cushion for a year and a half does something to your self-respect. Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’ I’d like to have seen her say that with mybrother sitting on top of her, farting into her right ear. It is very hard to maintain an air of composed dignity, I can tell you.
    The digital clock blinked and now it was four o’clock in the morning. I thought about Billy Scrivens: rich, successful and popular. He must have achieved everything he ever hoped for. He had his own TV show, he’d written books, he’d launched his own charity, he had a number-one novelty record and he even went bloody jogging in the mornings. How do other people find the time to achieve so much? I have this theory that nobody else in the world