My brother George is a man of wide-ranging interests. In his 36 years he has pursued ambidexterity and seven minutes under water without a breath; he has learnt to whistle through cupped hands and, in a separate feat, his rolled-up tongue; he has learnt to gleak¹ at predetermined targets; he can fart using his underarms, knee joints and eye sockets. And he has always loved fishing, whether or not catching actual fish was involved (such as when my parents, worried about the dangers of hooks, tied a rock to his line instead of bait).

When we were young, George and his hobbies² did not seem unusual. But back then, in the early 1980s, one of the most anticipated events of the year was a bird-calling competition, the sole point of which was to be the kid in our primary school that sounded most like a pigeon or crow or kookaburra. My friends and I spent our time learning to lip-synch Aunty Jack songs, inventing secret languages and attempting to turn our eyelids inside out with an ear cleaner. If you’d asked us why we wanted to turn our eyelids inside out, we would have thought you were crazy. You didn’t need a reason to flip eyelids. It was a joy unto itself.