Are they twins?!

I get asked this on a daily basis. Mostly, I smile patiently and say yes, this is X and this is Y. On a good day I'm thinking how nice it is that having twins cuts through our usual reluctance to talk to strangers and has meant that in the last year I've got to know nearly everyone on our street including the slightly insane. On a bad day I suppress the urge to bark 'no you idiot, I just had two identical looking babies at the same time, now let me get to the shops before one of them starts screaming'.

Twins do attract attention, even in the part of London I'm from which has an extraordinarily high proportion of them, I suppose mainly because of older mums and IVF. Mostly I love having twins, so mostly I love this attention and what I especially love is when people stop to tell me that they're a twin or that they had twins years ago. This is different from the random, pointless 'I knew some twins once and they were great friends / mortal enemies / gay', comments that you get, these are genuinely fascinating insights into a special bond that society can't get enough of.

When my twins were newborns my partner and I went to our local chemists to get some eye drops and the pharmacist came out to look at the boys. He seemed surprisingly misty-eyed for a man in late middle age and asked J and I if he could smell them. There was something so touching about his manner that we lifted them out for him to sniff, at which point he told us that he'd had twins two decades ago but that his daughter had recently died of a brain tumour. I'll remember this incredible encounter for the rest of my life, it was one of the earliest insights into both the amazing joy and the heartbreaking vulnerability that parenthood brings.