Our parents actually encouraged that so that when we were, you know, young children, we have piano lessons, we did this and we did that together, we were just like very, very close friends. And it was natural for us to play together rather than to play with other children.
When we got to adolescence, then that's where the truly competitive element came in and we found ourselves more likely to want not to be together.
Not that we argued tremendously but that we just were searching for our own identities and therefore we would clash more.
Up until the age of 18, we were always together, but when we left school, I went to teach in France for a year, my brother went straight to university to read sciences, I was doing language.
So that when I came to go to university, he was a year ahead of me and by sheer chance, wen ended up in the same college in the same university.
So the interesting factor was that we had deliberately aimed not to go to the same university to be seperate.
But because I had this year off and he went straight in, and through a quirk of selection process, we ended up in the same college.
And this college, one of the Cambridge University colleges, seemed to specialize in twins because there were about half a dozen sets of twins in this college in that year and...
But what we discovered was that we were very unlike them, because in virtually all cases those sets of twins in our college were reading the same subjects, lived in the same rooms, wore the same clothes, went to the same lectures.
And we actually feel quite different because my brother was doing sciences and I was doing languages, we had different rooms, we had different friends in different years.
So we realized that we were actually not anything like as close as other twins that we came into contact with.