Excitement is mounting here at the approach of the much-heralded Cousins Get-together, to be held at my cousin Liz's house in Oxford on Saturday. I have about 30 cousins - nobody's ever counted them successfully and come to the same number more than once. Liz's house is just a fairly standard semi-detached house where she and Roger live, so to make the get-together practical, she's just invited the so-called "southern cousins", so leaving out those who live in the north of England, Wales, Ireland, the USA and Australia.
The get-together was instigated by our "new" cousins, David - we discovered he was a cousin after my sister Gill took a DNA test and the database found a close match with David, a retired BBC online journalist. David was the son of our unmarried Aunty Joan, and he was adopted as a baby.
our "new" cousin David, with his wife Zanne (centre) and my sister Gill,
at Gill's house in Cambridge for their first meeting last year
family tree showing about 19 of my 30 or so cousins
Lois suggests that I take along the DVD on which I persuaded my late mother Nan to talk about the days when she and her 8 siblings were growing up in Bridgend, South Wales in the 1920's. They were a proud family but really quite poor, and their father was often ill, and unable to work a lot of the time. But the kids still had tons of fun together, living in a centuries-old house with stone sinks, mysterious gravestones, hidden passageways etc. The children slept sometimes 3 or 4 to a bed. Overall, however, they were happy times.
There were many happy days, my mother said. Especially days when they spent the day at the seaside - an uncle gave them the money for the bus-fare, she says.
This picture commemorates a day's outing to Southerndown, on the Glamorganshire coast in the 1920's - it shows my grandparents, Sidney and Gladys, and their four youngest children: (left to right) Ruth, Joan (David's mother), Nan (my mother) and Babs, who was Joan's twin.
my grandparents with the 4 youngest of their 9 children on a day's outing
to the coast at Southerndown, Glamorganshire in the 1920's
However, I decide in the end not to take it with me - instead, I decide just to tell some of the cousins about the DVD and offer to do copies for them if they're interested. One of the problems is that when my mother is talking about her childhood days, she is sometimes a bit rude about some of her siblings. Some feuds take a long time to die, it seems, and some of the old wounds obviously ran very deep and don't heal that quickly, even after 80 years! Oh dear!
Also I can see now that my chats with my mother were far too long and discursive and I would feel embarrassed to take up too much time at the get-together, rather than just let people chat amongst themselves.
And as for the video clips I took at the 2007 family gathering, I feel embarrassed now when I see that I was going around sticking my movie camera into people's faces - how could I have been so cheeky? What madness !!!!!
I also have tons of photos of the day. And here are the generations of Sidney and Gladys - yikes !!!!!! It just shows what a couple can do if they're not being "careful" enough - oh dear!
A 2007 get-together of Sidney and Gladys descendants, and their partners etc:
my mother is centre stage, third row from the front, in the blue suit,
Lois and I are over towards the left, and our daughter Alison is
sitting on the grass at the front on the far left, with little 1-year-old Josie
And by way of example, here are some of the overseas representatives:
my cousin Susan from Colorado, USA (left),
seen here with her daughter Magda
my Uncle Jack and Aunty Mary's 4 children: left, at the back, Hilary from
Sydney, Australia, with siblings Peter, Jeannette, and lastly Liz, who'll be hosting on Saturday
In hindsight, my mother might have felt at home in Philadelphia a city where my late sister Kathy settled down near to, after her marriage to Steve in 1985. Steve has sent me an email today. with the shock news that the city has won another award to add to the many already gracing the walls of the Mayor's Office. It seems that it's now been officially dubbed "the rudest city in America".
Luckily Lois and I visited Philadelphia back in 1985 when the locals were still relatively polite. Certainly we didn't encounter any rudeness personally.
flashback to 1985: Sarah (8) by the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia
Sarah (8), Alison (10) and Lois (39) at the Liberty Bell
[That's enough irrelevant old photos! - Ed]
The house was planned to cost £700k but ends up costing £1.7 million, and the couple, who live on their own, are mortgaged to within an inch of their lives. The couple will now spend the next few years, or decades, paying off the mortgage, while rattling around in the house like 2 peas in an enlarged version of the Royal Albert Hall.
16:00 Meanwhile, decluttering continues, in preparation for our downsizing from our current house in Cheltenham to a smaller house in Malvern.
Pay attention won't you - you may have to do this some day, and let me tell you there are numerous "traps" that, if you fall into, it's really hard to escape from. One of the worst of these is the so-called "nostalgia trap".
It's when you start sorting through piles of junk and you suddenly find yourself starting to relive the past, and taking a long time over it, an easy trap to fall into - my goodness!
Lois, while doing some routine decluttering,
innocently looking through a pile of old greetings-cards,
suddenly finds she's fallen into one of the worst
decluttering rabbit-holes: nostalgia. Yikes !!!!!
Oh dear !!!!
22:00 Well it's nearly autumn and a new series of Grand Designs has begun, in which crazy couples design and build enormous houses, big enough to house a medium-sized company with dozens of employees. These houses typically stick out like sore thumbs in the neighbourhood, and the couple then fill them with enormous but uncomfortable furniture, which they dot around here and there in the massively wasted space of their so-called "rooms".
We decide to watch this first episode to see if tonight's couple have learnt anything from the previous disasters that this series has featured over the years.
Well, they haven't, no doubt about that at all !!!
It's just pure "swank" !
What utter utter utter utter utter madness !!!!!
The house sticks out like a sore thumb in the neighbourhood. Note the lovely Victorian grand mansion behind the trees to the left in this picture:
What madness !!! [You've done that one once already! - Ed]
22:00 Enough said - we go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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