© Geoff Dyer. Extracted from ‘Working the Room’ by Geoff Dyer, to be published by Canongate on November 4th 2010 Almost half the children born in Britain today will never have a sibling. Geoff Dyer, acclaimed writer and only child, describes what it was like to grow up a singleton My mother often quoted with approval the maxim, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Unfortunately she thought this was intended as an exhortation rather than a warning. The mother’s instinct to indulge her only child was thereby reinforced by a higher authority. I was so spoilt that on the day my parents unexpectedly came to pick me up at primary school in the middle of the morning – I was about 8 at the time – I told the teacher that it was probably because they wanted to buy me a toy. In fact, it was to go to [...]
