The Little Lamb

My Scottish grandmother, Helen, had a remarkably efficient system for deciding who was best.

The firstborn won.

That was it.

No interviews, no assessments, no inconvenient evidence gathered over the years. Simply arrive first, and the crown was yours forever.

My father was the eldest child and therefore, in Helen's eyes, the cleverest, funniest, most handsome and most generally admirable human being ever to draw breath. Any faults he possessed were not faults at all but charming eccentricities. The rest of humanity occupied various lower divisions.

Even as children, my brother and I could see the absurdity of it. My father was not especially secretive about enjoying his position as favourite son. He basked in it. He absorbed admiration the way a cat absorbs sunlight. We teased him gently about it because the whole arrangement was so transparently ridiculous.

Unfortunately, the system was hereditary.

I happened to be the firstborn of my parents' litter and was therefore awarded the title of "The Little Lamb."

My brother, arriving second, was christened "The Wee Brute."

One can imagine how this went down.

On some days, my brother responded by becoming exactly the brute he had been accused of being. On others, he was wounded by it and spent entire afternoons wrapped in a fog of injustice. Neither reaction seemed unreasonable.

Being the Little Lamb was not the prize it might appear.

Young boys generally aspire to be astronauts, pirates, cowboys, footballers or superheroes. Nobody dreams of becoming a lamb. Lambs are soft, harmless creatures whose principal achievement is being eaten eventually. The title carried all the suffocating warmth of a hand-knitted cardigan two sizes too small.

More importantly, it was entirely unearned.

I had done nothing to deserve being adored. I had simply arrived first.

This was the corrosive genius of the system. It created winners and losers without requiring either merit or failure. Affection became a resource to be distributed unevenly according to birth order. The chosen child learned entitlement. The unchosen child learned grievance. Everyone lost something.

The most extraordinary thing was that the spell never quite wore off.

Many years later, long after I had become an adult, we were sitting around a dinner table when someone observed that I resembled a younger version of my father.

This prompted the obvious question.

"Which of them is more handsome?"

The answer was so predictable that it barely qualified as suspense.

My grandmother did not hesitate.

"My son."

Not a pause. Not a flicker of consideration. The verdict arrived with the certainty of a papal decree.

I wasn't offended. I would have been astonished by any other answer. The result had been predetermined decades earlier.

What surprised me was my father.

His face lit up.

Not with embarrassment. Not with amusement.

With delight.

Pure, unmistakable delight.

A grown man, grey-haired by then, receiving yet another instalment of the same compliment he had been collecting all his life, and finding it every bit as satisfying as the first.

I remember looking at him and thinking that perhaps this is what pride really does.

It blinds the proud person, certainly. But it also blinds the people who love them.

My grandmother's pride was so complete that she could no longer see her son clearly. Yet my father's pride in being loved that way prevented him from seeing the absurdity either.

The rest of us sat around the table watching a private transaction that had begun before we were born: a mother convinced she possessed the finest son in Great Britain and a son still delighted to hear it.

The remarkable thing was not that either of them believed it.

The remarkable thing was how happy it made them both.