Back in 2016, in this piece about Veuve Cliquot champagne, I mentioned my brother’s “ex-brother-in-law” Paco, a source of many anecdotes over the years. None of these anecdotes painted him in a good light. Brother-in-law might not be the right way to describe how the two of them were connected: my brother’s wife and Paco’s wife were sisters. Paco and his wife separated at least 15 years ago.

One of the stories that my brother has told, often, relates to the time that my father and I were in Spain for my niece’s baptism. We were eating a paella-style dish, with rabbit rather than seafood as the main source of protein. Paco saw himself as a son of the soil, the kind of man who would walk in the woods, brooding, contemplative, and kill animals for his dinner.

He had killed the rabbit in the rice dish that we had been served. There wasn’t much eating on it. The head was reserved for my father, and it was supposed to be some kind of honour. My father was not impressed. He had straightforward eating habits: meat and two veg, white rolls filled with ox-tongue, fried breakfasts. He would never have voluntarily eaten a rabbit’s head. He was poking at the tiny amount of meat on his plate and Paco urged my brother to tell him that he had shot the rabbit himself. In Spanish he said, “Jim … tell your father … that I killed this rabbit”. And he mimed the action for firing a rifle.

My brother translated his words into English. Quick as a flash my father said, “Tell him to aim higher next time and kill a sheep”. My brother laughed so hard that he could not immediately translate my father’s words back into Spanish. Paco urged him to. By the time he had recovered, my brother had had time to make something else up. I was at the far end of the table during all of this, concentrating on locating any remaining meat on my plate. It was only when my brother started laughing that I had any idea of what was going on. I was in the room for the whole thing but, like someone checking his phone when a winning goal is scored, I missed the key part of the action. Even so, I have been happy to hear the scene replayed by my brother many times, and to recall it for you here.

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