Sibling rivalry

Apparently sibling rivalry isn't just one of those dubious cliches, it's real. There are plenty of siblings who really do compete frantically with each other and can't bear it when their brother or sister seems to be doing much better than them.

A quarter of people polled on the subject admitted to sibling rivalry. They confessed to competing over just about everything - their careers, their homes, their cars, their holidays, their education, their cooking skills and, naturally, who their parents like best.

Well, I'm relieved to say my sister and I have never been prone to sibling rivalry. Our relationship has always been amicable, reasonable and non-competitive. We've both lived our lives as we wanted and we haven't spent a second comparing our different "score cards". We've never been jealous of the other's achievements, or gloating at their failures.

We were never bothered about who our parents liked best. Clearly my father, and possibly my mother, preferred my sister, but so what? It didn't stop me getting on with my life.

What motivates siblings to compete with each other anyway? Why are they desperate to be top dog and always one step ahead of the other? I really don't know, but I suppose if parents are the competitive type, that can get passed on to their children. Luckily our parents weren't in the least competitive.

But if your relationship with your sibling is the longest relationship you'll ever have, then constantly competing with each other will spoil your life in a big way.

And there's no easy fix, because siblings are bound to each other for life. You can't divorce them, you can't simply dump them. Somehow you have to find a modus operandi.

Just try to stop quibbling with your sibling.

If I'd been a girl

Like most men, I guess, I sometimes imagine what my life would have been like if I'd been a woman. Strangely though, considering my advanced age, I've never imagined how my childhood might have changed if I'd been a girl.

Instead of being packed off to an all-male boarding school at age 13, I'd probably have gone to the same secondary day school as my sister. This might have changed my life quite a lot.

Why? Because till the age of 13 I spent a lot of time with my sister and was very close to her. We played together, did things together, hung out together. But once I was at boarding school I only saw her occasionally and we were no longer so close. I was living my life, she was living hers, and this created a distance between us.

If I'd gone to the same school as her, we'd have shared our experiences as girls - how we were treated by boys, our periods, our clothes, our crushes, how we saw our bodies and all that stuff. We'd have been together at home, doing the domestic chores, doing our homework, going out with friends, and presumably the closeness would have continued.

Unfortunately that wasn't to be and after I left boarding school, although I tried hard to restore the old closeness, it was gone. After a while we both left the parental home and again we were leading separate lives that added to that sense of distance.

Nothing has happened over the years to change that, and despite all my efforts there has only been the bare minimum of contact between us. We can't have exchanged more than a few dozen emails in several decades.

Life is what it is and I've had to come to terms with the estrangement. But my life would have been so much richer if I was still as close to my sister as I was in my early childhood.

There's a deep sense of loss that can't be shed.

Battle of wills

I'm always fascinated by battles over wills and inherit-ance. Especially when the legal costs eat up the entire inherit-ance. And especially when nobody will budge an inch.

Peter Burgess's mother changed her will, cutting him out of it and leaving everything to his two sisters, Julia and Libby.

Libby and Peter disputed the new will, claiming their mother was suffering from dementia at the time. Julia insisted she had been quite rational.

When Mrs Burgess died in May 2009 she left around £200,000. But after nearly four years of legal quarrelling, leading to a six-day trial at the English Court of Appeal, that sum has been overtaken by the lawyers' bills.

The Court agreed that Peter Burgess should have been included in the will and that his mother didn't understand the changes she had made.

It astonishes me that people can dig their heels in so stubbornly, to the extent that families are driven apart and absurd amounts of money squandered in the name of pride, greed and self-righteousness.

Just a tiny bit of flexibility and common sense would have avoided the whole debacle and left them all with a handy windfall rather than a gaggle of lawyers looking forward to a fat profit.

Friends and relatives must have urged the three siblings countless times to settle their differences and bring the dispute to an end, but to no avail, and the lumbering machinery of the law took over.

The problem arose of course with the existence of two wills, and the question of which one was valid. Changing one's will is always a hazardous business, liable to just that sort of posthumous wrangling instead of a straightforward transfer of assets.

The strong suspicion is that Mrs Burgess was pressured into making the change, though it seems the court made no comment on that. But it was certainly a change with devastating consequences.

Pic: not the siblings in question