I was four when Sarah was born, and I was furious about it. Properly furious, for about a year. There's a baby in my house and nobody asked me. I'd like to say I got over it quickly. I did not. But I got over it eventually, and it turns out that's the whole story of me and Sarah, really. She arrives, I resist, and then I can't imagine life without her.
Sarah didn't learn to drive until she was twenty-seven. Not because she couldn't, but because she was fed up asking people for lifts. So she just went and did it. Failed three times. Passed the fourth. That's Sarah all over. She'll put something off for years, and then one day decide she's done, and just quietly sort it herself while the rest of us are still talking about doing things.
She sends a card for everything. Birthdays, obviously. Anniversaries, obviously. My cat's birthday, which is not obvious at all, but there it is, every year, addressed to the cat. I don't know what the cat does with it. I keep them anyway.
When my daughter was born, Sarah stayed for two weeks. She did every single night feed so I could sleep. I want to say that again because I don't think you can hear it properly the first time. Every night feed. For two weeks. That is not a small thing to give someone. That is not a card, that is not a nice gesture, that is someone getting up in the middle of the night, over and over, for you, and asking for nothing back.
And then last Christmas she cried at a Boots advert. An advert. For Boots. I will never let this go, and I bring it up now, in public, on her wedding day, because that is my job as her sister. But I think it tells you something true about her too. Underneath the person who taught herself to drive out of sheer stubbornness, there is someone whose heart is right on the surface, all the time, ready to be got at by literally anything.
James, you're getting all of that. The stubbornness and the softness both. You're getting someone who will notice your cat's birthday, if you get a cat, and who will show up at two in the morning if you need her to, and who will cry watching adverts next to you on the sofa and dare you to say anything about it.
I was furious the day she arrived. I'm not furious any more. I've had a long time to get used to having a sister like her, and I still think I got the better end of that deal, being the one who got to grow up next to her.
So would everyone raise a glass. To Sarah, who I was furious about for exactly one year and grateful for ever since. And to James, who's about to find out what the rest of us already know.
To Sarah and James.