I always wonder how different I would be had I grown up with a sister rather than just the two brothers.

Don’t get me wrong - I love my brothers. And I also quite like them. (The two are not always mutually inclusive). For sure, I have issues with them both and no doubt they have legion complaints about me (with their complaints being listed in colour coded columns, with dates, times and various appendices explaining who else was in the room and who else was offended/upset/disgusted by my behaviour).

Tuesday is International Siblings Day, a day where we are exhorted to celebrate all that is great and good about our brothers and/or sisters. Of all the days that are crafted by the free market capitalists, this surely has to be the most potentially divisive. We have Mother’s and Father’s day - obviously there are folk who hate their parents but there is still, if not an emotional, a legal link with your maw and paw.

On becoming grandparents so many hatchets are buried and broken bonds renewed and repaired. Where there’s a will there’s a way; or, as I prefer to say, where there’s a will there’s a bunch of greedy children waiting tae see who got what. Parents and children will always have that figurative umbilical cord.

But there is no such link with siblings. I have friends who hate their siblings more than can be expressed in words; it’s a unique hatred, a hatred reserved solely for those that made one’s life a living, daily hell for the better part of two decades and beyond. I know of one pair of brothers who have to have their Christmas visits to their beloved mum in Renfrew timetabled so that neither of them are together in the same room in the presence of cutlery. Seriously. Social Services will intervene if there is some to-do between a parent and a child; but I don't think I have heard of such an intervention in the case of a sibling.

Luckily I had no such internecine issues with my big and wee brother. Our disputations were altogether more low key in their occurrence and intensity. There was never and will never be the compulsion to remove the silver service should more than one of the Kohli sons be in the same room at the same time.There was of course the controversial “Baw-gate” in 1978 when my older brother thought the best way to get me to be better at football was to place his foot (at high speed) into my “baws”. I lay in the middle of the pitch for a good half hour as he and my cousins played around me. But boys will be boys.

But as I grow older, and watch my daughter blossom into the early throes of womanhood, I cannae help but wonder what it would have been like to have had an ever present female in my formative years. Would I have been any better informed about the ways and wiles of woman? Would the testosterone tension of my childhood have been at all softened and eased by an input of oestrogen? Would the dynamic of the 'Three Musketeers' have been much changed by 'Two Musketeers' and a girl? How would we, with our two cousins (also brothers) have formed a ready to play five-a-side team? And would I have had more luck when it comes to the ladies?

Such thoughts and dalliances are absolutely academic. I have what I have; two, decent, very successful brothers. They are two very different people and for all these years I always thought that I was the shuttle between them; but now I have realised that we are three islands. While the distance between us on our archipelago of affection may not be the hop, skip and jump we once hoped it might be, we are brothers. And though maybe we need a ferry rather than a rowing boat to visit each other’s hinterland, I am certain that in the stormiest of storms they will both always offer safe harbour.

As is expected in a man closer to the end than the beginning, I look down at my own progeny with pride. They have a beautiful relationship; neither is an island to the other. They are land-locked in their love.