Brangelina's Twins: Chips Off the Old Block?

You cannot fault Brangelina for beaming their new twins across the world on the cover of Hello, because they are giving all the cash to charity. But we shouldn't let this stop us laughing at them for the dozy things they say.

All new parents are soppy, so let's pass over all the stuff they said that is soppy. But Brad, at one point, averred: "Viv is proving to resemble Ange in spirit, attitude and physicality . . . and Knox, he's a bit of me." To recap, the twins Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, who have names, incidentally, like the garage and pastry shop (respectively) of a small midwestern town, were born on July 13. So even brushing over magazine lead times and boring stuff like that, they are less than a month old. Can they really be this fully formed already?

It's quite possible that they resemble their parents, though it's more likely that they look like Brad Pitt - in an evolutionary trick of the light, babies at their youngest and most vulnerable are supposed to resemble the father because, factoring in the "mama's baby, papa's maybe" principle, only a very strong family likeness will keep him hanging about.

The spirit and attitude is more complicated - developmental manuals always tell you how babies can recognize your voice, imitate movements and remember the theme tune from your pregnancy daytime telly of choice, and you always think, "Tell you what, maybe yours can. Mine can't. Mine is like a tiny hedgehog I found under a bush." And yet, parental expectation - as well as genetic legacy - is a strong determinant of personality. So if Brad, for instance, thinks of himself as the apotheosis of masculinity, and Angelina as the same of femininity, then he is likely to nurture characteristics of his own that he recognises in his son, and those of his wife in his daughter, without realizing he's doing it, thus eventually rearing two peerless mini-mes for the Hollywood of tomorrow.

He may well turn out to be right, in other words, but if so, it will have been his own doing. No wonder people have children. It is so very godlike.