Roots and Memories

So it turns out, I'm something like a half English, three-eighths Scottish, one sixteenth Irish (I really can't claim that I'm practically Irish any more), and one sixteenth Welsh. Well, one sixteenth from Cardiff, I'm sure many people would tell that makes me as Welsh as a deep-fried Anne Robinson.

It's been genuinely fascinating reading my grandmother's notes on her family, the Caithness Youngs and her in-laws, my mother's rather less appreciated partilineal Gaulds. A lot of my background is actually in Cape Town and old Northern Rhodesia, what is now Robert Mugabe's stale coffee cup Zimbabwe. How would I go about picking out elements of my life to paint a picture? I feel as though a more accurate portrait of me is a reflection of the media I've had wash over me; that I can orient a map of myself by pin-pointing what TV I turned onto on mid-nineties Saturday mornings, which provides a stark contrast to the foot-loose Youngs of the older generation, who spent their youths emigrating like they were on the run from the law. Now if you go abroad, you fall into clichées of broke youths discovering themselves in a haze of pot and south Asian train tracks.

If from beyond the grave my grandmother can share with me a memory of our parents ushering us out to witness the utterly uninspiring passing of Haley's comet, then I feel hopeful that my memories will equally tell an interesting story in the future. I just hope that I won't have to wait til the comet next comes around.