Olivia C vs Olivia R

Sibling rivalry, settled the only way we know how.

My sister is also called Olivia. Has been her whole life, which ought to count for something. Last week, the two Olivias in my life went to war, and only one of them was ever actually going to win.

When I was eight and my sister was six, we were staying at my dad’s house and he’d made chilli for tea. We’d been out all day, we were both knackered, and as a special treat he let us eat on the sofa instead of at the table.

It was a new sofa. He’d told us this approximately seven times before handing over the bowls, in the tone of a man who knew the potential dangers and needed to make himself clear.

Three seconds later, my sister spilled chilli on it.

My dad’s face did something I’d never seen before. My sister burst into tears. And then, despite the chilli being nowhere near me, despite the new sofa being entirely intact on my side, I burst into tears too.

“What are you crying for?” my dad asked, completely baffled.

I pointed at my sister with a shaky finger.

“Because she’s crying.”

That’s basically been the dynamic of our entire relationship. People used to think we were fraternal twins growing up, not because we looked alike, but because we seemed to be running on the same emotional circuit. We fought like cat and dog, the way most siblings close in age do.

One particularly memorable battle happened when I was about thirteen and our mum had popped out to the corner shop. Mid-argument, my sister picked up a full bottle of Heinz salad cream and launched it directly at my head.

I ducked just in time. The bottle didn’t.

It hit the living room door, came apart on impact, and redecorated the entire room. Including my mum’s cream carpet.

You’d think salad cream would more or less blend in with a cream carpet because, you know, cream on cream. But you would be wrong. It turned a sort of off-black colour that even at thirteen years old I understood meant we were both dead meat the second Mum walked back through that door, regardless of whose fault it actually was.

But we also looked out for each other, in whatever clumsy way siblings manage that sort of thing. At school, she went through a spell of being bullied by a group of girls a year above her. As a brother, there’s only so directly you can get involved without making everything worse. So instead, I quietly let it be known to a particularly fearsome girl in my own year that one of my sister’s tormentors had been talking about her behind her back.

That girl sorted the entire situation out within about a week, with considerably more efficiency than I could’ve managed myself.

I supported her via proxy. It remains one of my proudest achievements.

We talk to each other like we’re perpetually one insult away from a fight. Anyone earwigging on one of our phone calls would assume we hate each other. We don’t. This is just what Northern affection sounds like when you strip the sentiment out of it.

Which brings me to last week, when I made the catastrophic error of telling her I’d booked tickets to see Olivia Rodrigo.

I was sat on my newly assembled flat-pack garden furniture when she called. The same furniture that took me roughly four hours to put together, in case you’d somehow missed the million updates I posted about it at the time. It was the middle of the British heatwave, I was overheating gently in the garden, and I was very much in the mood for some comic relief.

I just didn’t realise I was about to be the comic relief.

We’d done the pleasantries. Update on my nephew, who is apparently now obsessed with a film called K-Pop Demon Hunters, which I will be looking into purely so I have ammunition for later. Then she asked about a family getaway, possibly early April.

“Can do,” I said, “but it can’t be the first weekend. I’m seeing Olivia Rodrigo.”

There was a pause that told me everything I needed to know about what was coming.

“You what? You mean that teenage American pop star?”

“She’s in her twenties,” I said. “But yeah.”

“What kind of man are you again? How old are you? Grow up.”

All said with the particular Northern fondness that sounds, to anyone outside the family, exactly like contempt.

“I’ll have you know I’ll happily watch K-Pop Demon Hunters if I fancy it, you little swine.”

“Aren’t you going to be surrounded by fourteen-year-old girls and women having a midlife crisis? Maybe I should come.”

“Her music is juvenile for my age. I’ll take that on the chin. But plenty of men like Olivia Rodrigo.”

“Name some.”

“Well. My boyfriend likes her. And I’m fairly sure all his mates do too.”

“Let me rephrase. Straight men.”

We both started laughing at that point, because we both knew exactly where this was going.

“Listen,” I said, “most gay men I know are more masculine than your average straight bloke.”

“How d’you work that out?”

“Riddle me this. Is there anything more masculine than being with another man? A big, stubborn, hairy unit who’s awkward to deal with and significantly harder work in bed than a woman would be. Sounds a lot more masculine to me than getting with a girl.”

“Whatever,” she said. “I’m not buying it.”

She didn’t need to buy it. I wasn’t really selling it either. We were just doing what we’ve always done, which is have a perfectly serious argument about something that doesn’t matter at all.

I’ll take the grow up comment on the chin too, while I’m here. I’m thirty-six, paying a mortgage, and I have lost actual sleep this week deciding whether the cheaper tickets are worth the risk of a restricted view.

But I’m still going. And if it really comes down to it, I maintain that I could make a fairly compelling case for the masculinity of gay men to a jury of unbiased Northern mothers, and win.

Olivia C remains unconvinced. Olivia R, wherever she is, has no idea any of this happened, and is almost certainly winning regardless.