When my little brother was about four and a half years old.
He was so amusing to me, his older brother. The way he held on to his tea bottle and guarded it like his most precious possession, having only recently lost his dummy eighteen months before.
We were very poor and Ray's bottle had to be improvised, the teat was made from a finger from a rubber glove, and the bottle was an old medicine bottle washed out, he carried it everywhere with him.
Although we tried to hide it from him to wean him off it, he always had the knack of finding it again. He would hide it himself if any of our neighbours came to visit.
Ray didn't watch much television, but when the new commercial channel came out and began showing adverts, Ray would be attracted by the music from the adverts, so would come out from hiding for the adverts break, then go back behind the chair, that's after kicking me in the shins for laughing at him.
As he grew older, he began to collect car numbers, but soon got bored standing there for hours, because cars were few then.
His next project was to write down the adverts that came on the television but you had to be quick because they were only short. Soon this got a bit repetitive for my brother, as the same adverts came on over and over, in the early days adverts were rare and only a few companies could afford to put them on the television.
The time came for the school photo; my brother wore one of my dad's shirts to school, along with a red bow tie on elastic, which I delighted in twanging at every opportunity.
In later years my little brother did get his revenge however by drawing a mustache complete with beard and glasses on my prize possession a Kate Bush poster, little did he know I had already drawn a ginger beard on his Abba poster the blond girl in the band seem to suit it somehow.
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