I was sat with my family at Xmas. My whole immediate family. My long-divorced parents and their respective partners. My big and little brother. Two dogs. One cocker spaniel named Jarvis, and a French Pitbull called Pepe. Me and my little brother had managed to tidy away our long running blood feud just long enough so that we might enjoy this bi-annual festive reunion. The idea for this reunion - which we refer to as Legends of the Fall after mum's favourite film, a film about warring brothers that slip in and out of exile – occurred not long after my big brother was deported from China, after having called it home for 15 years. There was a sense of rallying round at that time. Of making an effort to make Tam feel at home. My parents' divorce wasn't pretty. You'd have bet your life at the time that no further Xmas together was remotely possible. I'm proud that as a bunch, we can let bygones be bygones, even if only once twenty years or so has passed.

Both previous times Legends has taken place, it's ended in a serious breakdown of some descript. Usually tearful, with occasional threats of violence and bodily harm. That's why we opted for bi-annual. You need a fallow year. You need to let the engines cool. This December just past all of the drama occurred off screen, in the preamble to the event itself. Endless crisis talks about the beef I'm having with my little brother. Xmas was a song of peace, as a result. We'd burnt ourselves out already. Anyway, on the second night we're all sitting around eating sugar watching Rocky IV and this new tune of ours came up. Today You Become Man. My big brother started harping on about it. This got me nervous, as I hadn't (still haven't) played it to my old man. Tam asked if we could stick it on, I told him I didn't have the album link. File's expired. I then sank into a kind of dread, what being a little hash stoned, running it around in my head over and over: did I just make all that up? Fuck. Have I gone too far here? I must have sexed up the dossier at least. Surely. I'm forever sexing up the dossier. This will be the end of it. Out of the will levels. Cheerio Bashir. Fuck.

Before long, in lieu of the recording, my big brother started recounting his experience in full. This was a relief. We'd get straight to the bottom of it. No festering anxiety to spoil what's left of Rocky IV. This was earlier than my big brothers usual slot time with the circumcision anecdote. Usually you have to wait until you're deep in the session before he brings out the big gun. Once you're lucidly enjoying your night, around 3 or 5am, once you're totally relaxed, that's usually when he'll strike. A matinee performance for the whole family it was then. To my absolute joy, his version matched up to mine almost perfectly, with nominal protest from my dad as to the details. Then a deeper joy, a continuation of the tale which I'd not yet heard. A post script from hell. Several years after the olde worlde, anaesthetic-less genital mutilation/enhancement of my big brother, he was a guest at the ceremony of his younger cousin Amine. According to Tam, after they slice off the mini neck warmer, they place it into a little satchel. Tam made it his business to get a hold of this satchel right after Amine's moment of truth, then to dance around the room flailing it up above his own grinning head in celebration of this newly minted manhood.

I can think of few weirder things that might happen to you at age five then getting shipped from northern England to Kabyle for this. It's kind of like alienation squared. Once you rotate back to Huddersfield, who have you got to share your experience with? At least the little lads in Maillot have got each other, they're brothers of the olde worlde chop. The chop is part of their collective identity. It doesn't mark you out as utterly unique, as somehow outside everybody else. My brother is one of those people that turn everything into a joke. His sense of humour is abstract in the extreme. Sometimes I wonder if he's pathologically incapable of taking anything seriously. Reality is there to be laughed at, and little else. That's not to say he's devoid of empathy, it's just his basic way of computing the world, of protecting himself from it. There's no off button to the rinse artistry. I wonder if his making abstraction his homeland truly began with the absurdity in the high Atlas? And in turn, given that I only became an artist pretty much because my big bro told me to when I was 11, is it where a large part of my own leaning into the strange begins? What made Tam inevitably made me, growing up in umpteen different places, one constant was your big brother. I tried to emulate him in everything. Maybe I'm clutching at straws there. Appropriating his suffering. I don't know. I'm certainly commodifying it.

Another thing which is of course for sure: if you had to choose one of the three Saoudi brothers with whom to fight alongside in a war, you'd choose Tam each time. Hands down. If we're talking a frontline roll, at least.