So he did well in school. He got Engineering. He came second in his class. He got a girlfriend – a new one in college. I met her. I knew as soon as I saw her that she was crazy about him. She was a keeper. They were like night and day. He was tall and well-built and as brown as some kind of really nice old wood. She was tiny, blonde, small in every way, as pale as snow. They were like a couple from a book, or from an old story. He was the exact opposite of my brother who couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed three days a week, who never went to a lecture if he knew someone who would give him the notes or if he knew they’d be online in time. John Brown went to every lecture. Sometimes when we talked he told me about brilliant engineering projects he had studied, like bridges, or skyscrapers built on rafts so they could stand up in sand, or the Thames flood barrier. All sorts of things. The one that really got him going was the Large Hadron Collider. He told me all about it and when they started it up he was all excitement. He showed me a YouTube video about it. What Is The LHC And How Does It Work? I remember things, but not everything. The protons are accelerated to ninety-nine per cent of the speed of light. Giga electron volts. All that shit. But I didn’t understand what they were talking about.

I remember once he was in our kitchen and he grabbed me and made me look at a tree and there was this huge crow perched on the outside of a branch and the branch was bending so much we thought he’d fall off, and then the crow started to shuffle sideways step by step until he got into a strong part of the branch. We were laughing our asses off.

That crow gets Euler–Bernoulli Theory, he said. Yay for plastic bending!

Engineers! Like the branch wasn’t even plastic. And who the fuck are Oiler and Bernoulli? But my brother never talked about this stuff. I know programming languages and microchips are not exactly hot, but yeah. I saw one of his textbooks once. Introduction to Digital Systems: Modelling, Synthesis, and Simulation Using VHDL. Now that’s definitely catchier than Pride and Prejudice. And it cost a hundred and thirty-five euro. It was a laugh a minute: the present states are the outputs of flip-flops. Therefore to use J-K flip-flops to implement sequential circuits, inputs J and K must be determined from the output states of the J-K flip-flop. So that’s OK. Next time I go to the pool I’ll remember to bring J and K.