Doing a bit of genealogical work this weekend, I noticed once again how different my mother's and father's family histories are. Dad's family wrote for itself a saga spicily peppered with street brawls, surprise attacks on the unsuspecting, even a local policeman, for often quite flimsy reasons. The favoured past-time was boxing, the bare-knuckled variety, and at least two of my grandfather's generation achieved some degree of notoriety in the sport.

About the middle of last year my brothers Greg and Derek visited our few relatives on the maternal side in England. Greg came back with the observation that we all seem to take after dad's family rather than mum's. He felt that mum's family are a much more gentle, less combative people than dad's.

I look back on my school days, and those of Greg too, as an endless succession of playground fights, long-running feuds, hot-headed confrontations and pointless challenges. Getting through the day without facing a threat was a rare and cherished event. At every school I attended I used to marvel that other children appeared able to get through their entire school years without a single serious confrontation. Each time I switched school I hoped that things might change for me, that I could start afresh, leaving behind the tense network of alliances and oppositions that seemed an integral part of my life. Each time, things turned out just the same.

Later, I remember a girlfriend's astonishment at what she described as my tendency to 'come out of my corner fighting'. To me we were simply negotiating our way to an agreement, or an accommodation of each other's wants. To her, we were having an argument without reason or pretext.

In retrospective, there seems a direct and continuous theme stretching back four generations. The genes that have persistently kept us tall, blond and blue-eyed seem also to have kept us robust (let's say) defenders of ourselves and our positions.

Now I get to the point of this post: if what I see really does exist, then mum spent a lifetime losing her negotiations and confrontations with dad simply by being unable to summon up competitive levels of vehemence. A sixty-year losing streak, if this is what it was, must be a hard thing to assimilate without either dissolving into a jelly or hardening one's reactions.

It seems mum has finally hardened in her reactions.

Today Greg phoned to say that dad had just called and told him that mum had whacked him around the head, broken the frame of his glasses, and scratched his face. Greg was on his way to effect repairs, mechanical, medical and psychological.