You are my sister and I love you

It is Rosie’s birthday today, I think, I'm very confused as to what day it is. Anyway...

Adrian, my favourite brother-in-law, has often attempted to capture the essence of the woman he loves on film. However, Rosemary Taylor is a contradiction. A single photograph cannot begin to say it all.

For example, Rosie has a music degree, is a music teacher and has performed in more countries than Mum, Dad and I have visited. Yet she has a really truly appalling taste in music. To this day she actually possesses such albums as Smurfs Go Pop, Vengaboys - Vengaboys, No Angel - Dido and that one by Timmy Mallet. Oh and everything that Mozart even wrote.

This can perhaps be explained by the fact that YMCA was number one in the charts on the day she was born and if you trace exactly nine months earlier, to the approximate date of her conception, you’re looking at Night Fever by the Beegees. Ew.

Despite this, she is a very good music teacher, helping her class to 100% A-C pass rate at GCSE last year – in a school with only a 55% A-C pass rate overall. Which is bloody good.

Rosie’s other talents include art, photography and buying clothes which co-ordinate with one another. She is very grown up, shopping at Marks & Spencers and belonging to the National Trust. But she does have one of those Tetley Bitter t-shirts that you win if you drink ten pints of Tetley in one night and her most recent compositions include a dance re-mix of The Theme from Rhubard and Custard.

Through years of driving a Mini, she has become an excellent wheelchair-pusher and all round disability advocate. She teaches a number of disabled students and finds novel ways of promoting full participation. Shopping trips with Rosie guarantee that I have full access to everywhere, even places I didn’t particularly want to go. She has also got me out of some tight scrapes by cunning use of the Disability Card.

A natural diplomat, she is the only member of our family who can make our Gran laugh, through a combination of complex psychological trickery and toilet humour. But despite her normally happy-go-lucky nature, Rosemary is still aggrieved in her belief that it was my own embittered eight-year-old self that tore her most treasured Kylie Minogue poster in the summer of 1989, under the influence of Bonjovi when they were good.

It wasn’t. Really. I didn’t go anywhere near it.