My older brother, Martin Torrado Mouzo, sits in front of me, fidgety and only slightly annoyed. He’d hate to admit it to my face, but he’s happy to help me out, I am his favourite sibling- after all.  

At 28 years old, he has made time out of his busy day for an interview with me, because that is exactly the kind of person he is. Falsely indifferent and deeply caring. 

The perfect caricature of an irritating, but loving, older brother.  

Mouzo works as an Associate Software Engineer for the CQC, an “independent regulator of health and adult social care in England”. He tells me about his work often, and I sit there and pretend to understand what all the coding jargon means. 

Sometimes, he seems tired of the topic, but when asked what skill he would master overnight he responded coding. Ever the pragmatist, he explains that it would be very helpful for his job, but also that it’s broad and applicable to many things. He opened up slightly more when asked what about coding sparked his interest- video games, he answered, almost immediately. He then clarified, “you type a bunch of words in the right order, and you can get it to do almost anything. It’s the closest thing to real life magic.” It was the first time I had ever asked such a question, as if I thought he somehow stumbled into his own career, but the answer felt real- in a way, artistic- something I could relate to. 

Mouzo tells me about a defining moment from his childhood, in which, at a very young age, he witnessed me- a toddler- almost get trampled by a stampede of horses galloping through a valley. I was pulled out of the way just in time, but he was terrified- and clearly affected, considering his recall of scenario- a near-death experience even the near-victim doesn’t remember. He described how it affected him, to feel like he almost lost someone he loved at the snap of a finger (or the clop of a hoof) and how fickle it made life seem, tacking on a half-serious “don’t mess with horses” to finish. 

His answer- though silly as always- felt so uncharacteristically sincere that I almost forgot who I was talking to. 

To lighten the mood, and in the irritating way only a younger sister would, I finish off the interview asking him which of his five siblings he loves the most, and with a poker-face he replies, “the one that almost got trampled by horses.”  

There he is.