My parents used to worry about my big brother Simon - just a little bit. He didn’t seem to be interested in school that much, and he liked loud music. He read, understood and could talk about Kafka, Dostoyevsky and other great authors in his mid teens; well, sure, but the loud music. It’s so loud.

Simon has never really done things the straightforward way. He toiled away in the mire (computer science, journalism) here in Ireland for years before finding his true vocation - anthropology (I think it was soon after that when he met his other great passion, his wife Amy). He got his masters in social science at the University of Chicago, then won a scholarship to complete his Phd in anthropology there too. Simon is off in Fiji at the moment conducting research into Fijian culture and its relationship to the country’s colonial past. (this is no doubt a gross oversimplification).

Some days Fiji seems as arbitrarily far away as any other place in the world, but some days it feels quite a bit farther. Air travel has many benefits, but the type of multi-year, slow-motion jet lag that anybody with family in faraway places experiences isn’t one of them. To paraphrase a recent email:

We’re all older, I’m getting married, have a lot of grey hair, have been in Belfast for two years - you’ve been away for most of that time. All of sudden we’re two grown men.

It is funny how time flies, and funny how distance in miles can remain static, but seem totally different from month to month.

How proud are we of my brother Simon? Pretty damn proud. He’s not dead or anything, just so you know.