My sibling is badder than yours
Last night at a party I was comparing degrees of sibling black-sheepness with the one other reader of this weblog. As it happens, his sister and my brother have reached matching degrees of naughtiness. We mapped them on a chart according to number of years the respective families have not spoken to them, time done in jail, possible exposure to drugs and involvement with local low-life. I had to admit that his sister sounds like she could floor my brother anytime.
Then this morning for a moment I thought I'd trump him when I received the following text message from a friend in Italy: 'Man stabbed to death in your mother's village, I feared the worst for a moment'.
I quickly looked it up on a local paper online: fortunately nothing to do with my brother - although, with a village population of around 1,500 the chances of him being one of the two people directly involved involved were one in 750.