Christmas with my brother

Ever since I was a child, I’ve associated Christmas with my mentally disabled brother Chris. Technically, he’s my half-brother — I have four half-siblings and a whole one — but to refer to him that way feels a bit mean-spirited, as if I’m trying to put some distance between us. Is ‘mentally disabled’ the right term to describe him? When I was growing up, the psychiatrists had him down as ‘schizophrenic’, but he was later reclassified as suffering from Asperger’s syndrome. After that particular diagnosis fell out of fashion, he became, simply, ‘autistic’, which is probably accurate, although too vague to convey much about him.

Chris has been institutionalised since he was a teenager, either in hospitals or care homes. He needs quite a lot of looking after and, for a variety of reasons, my father Michael and his first wife didn’t feel up to it. He can be tricky. If you’re walking with him into a house or a room, he often gets rooted to the spot as if unable to cross the threshold.