[DanaC]

A Big Brother 6 years older than me and a fundamental part of what made me the person I am. Clever, calm, wise, artistic and uber capable at anything he tries, brave, good looking, and funny.

He dropped out of education after a year of doing art at college and went off to work in the real world. factory work, building site jobs, through to an apprenticeship as a joiner and plasterer, basic carpentry and design, then off to sell partitioning contracts for a large partitions firm. Went and studied Neuro Linguistic Programming and qualified as a counsellor, started up a little design house (with my ex) for counter culture products and designed for that for 10 years.

Now he has his ideal job: self-employed, landscape garden design and dry stone walling :P Outdoors, works with his hands, gets to use his designer brain. He's quite ike my dad in that way. Dad was an inveterate tinkerer. Loved nothing more than a technical problem to solve, or a broken thing to fix. Ingenius lash-ups and fixes to boggle the mind.

And it means he can work his jobs around the school day and school holidays and allow my Sister in Law to pursue her nursing career where ever it takes her.


Though he left education after high-school, he has never stopped learning. He reads, constantly. Fascinated by scientic stuff, the natural world, and particle physics, you name it, he's got a handle on current theories as much as a layman can from the books available. And from his time as a counsellor he's retained an interest in neuro science and development. A genuine auto-didact.

Oh yeah, and he used to be really into the club scene, and still, now and then if a dj he knows is doing a set he and his mates will have a boys night out. He is and has always been a fucking kick ass dancer. He's also very well trained in some martial arts, and has a martial artist's physique and grace of movement: lean but solid muscle.

He's one of my favourite people in all the world *smiles* and he lives at the bottom of the lane, down the hill from my house. In fact, he's why I ended up living in Yorkshire in the first place. It was visiting his house after he moved here, that got me and J interested in moving.

Aside from a brief spell of a couple of years whne we were each off doing our own things and weren't much in contact, we've always had a close relationship. He was my babysitter, co-conspirator and mentor in mischief and fun. When I was a tot and had to soak for 15 full minutes in a bath of some eczema remedy or other, it was often Martin who sat and told me ghost stories to keep me from getting too bored. It was Martin who woke me up in the early hours of Christmas Day to assure me he had definately heard sleighbells and hooves on the roof, and ushering me to the window to see if we could spy anything. And it was Martin who came up with wild and wonderful practical jokes and fancy dress costumes.

Bless him he (and his mates) was endlessly patient with his baby sister.

Not to say we never fought, because we did. Not to say he didn't sometimes wind me up to the point of tears, because he did. But to be fair I did also once wreck his Evil Knieval action figure by playing with it in a bath with oil in it. And I did go through a brief phase of ransacking his bookshelves and then writing in his books...