This too, too Solid Flesh

I'm returning to work tomorrow. I can't stand the near-insanity of days off. I danced in my room to Chihuahua, then succumbed to a coughing fit. I attempted to write and instead played Solitaire. I have watched fourteen episodes of Inu Yasha. I tried a Venetian cod recipe for my brother and drank two glasses of gin in the process. I practised my Italian on the dog, who in turn prodded me with his Pokemon toy. I chased the dog around the kitchen because he seemed lonely, and had another coughing fit.

This afternoon, I decided to try and trace my genealogy. Again, I failed. I'm sick of it. I can't get past the 1700s because our surnames are far too generic. I'm aware that my maternal grandfather and his grandfather lived in Glasgow, and theirs before them. Before that, it was Ireland for a few generations and before that, everyone just didn't know how to write so they're forgotten forever. Boo.

I'd curse my ancestors for their typical ignorance, if I knew what their names were. I should also curse them for apparently changing their surnames every blue moon. Take a line from my paternal side: Monteith. Monteith, apparently, is just a lie. It's not a real surname at all, which will come as a shock to all those who have come and gone as Monteiths. Some American guy on a forum is all, "it's an Americanised version of the name!" but this man is an idiot. How can it be Americanised when my family called itself that in the 1400s? Tosser.

Kneale (my maternal grandmother's surname) is apparently Manx. Now we're getting somewhere. Except it turns out it's a derivation of O'Neill. Because there aren't like a gazillion of them about in England alone. Gordon is more interesting; lots of theories abound about that name, and when I was in the South of France a few years ago, I was able to look into the genealogogy of the famille de Gourdon, apparently from which we derive our name. From there, they became Gourdon and were found in Normandy and parts of what is now the Netherlands. It doesn't help much. My brother bears an uncanny resemblance to James Van der Beek, but that's about all I have to go on with regards to Dutch/French ancestry.

It's frustrating. The problem is that England was conquered by everyone and every clan just seems to have fecked about all over the place, changing names here, running away there. I can't even be sure any "true" English people exist today. Celts aren't native; the Picts aren't native; the Angles aren't native. I feel certain that my father's side is of Celtic descent, my mother's of Gallic-Celtic descent, but there is no way to prove any of this apart from the few times our family crosses "noble" lines which will have been recorded better. I hate the uncertainty. I think this is one of the reasons why I'm more quick to define my family as "European" than "English"-- we just seem to be mutts from muttish isles.

I'm mixed-up right now. I want so badly to know the origins of our family; I want to know how the amazing changes in the Continent shaped us, but I never will, so I'll just assume that whenever anything exciting happened, my ancestors were digging up turnips in some woebegotten field. It's not something to angst about; it's a fact of life, and what does it matter to the soul where the borrowed body comes from, etc, etc? Well... because history's interesting. That's why.

I was watching a programme about the First World War with my father a few weeks ago, and he went off on his usual "Serbia ruined my life" rant. It turned out that my great-grandfather had been making plans to emigrate to America when the events of the First World War had kicked off. He was preparing to sell off his house and leave, when suddenly everyone's at each other's throats. Europe was torn apart, England thrown into the mix. He had been drafted to fight; and instead of leaving for the New World, he stayed to fight. His wife, who was pregnant, gave birth to my father's father. They stayed in Liverpool because, post-war, they couldn't afford to leave. My father was born, and in turn he met my mother, who was working in Liverpool at the time, and begot me. If Franz Ferdinand hadn't been assassinated, I wouldn't be here. It's a fanciful notion, but it's true. Even if the war had still kicked off had he lived, it may not have escalated at the speed with which it did to prevent my great-grandfather leaving England. The effects of such an event still resonate heavily in my bloodlines. It's ridiculous to dismiss history, and one's own genealogy; this historical fact is something that shaped my own family, and that's only in the past century. Who knows what earlier generations of Smith-Gordons got up to? I like to think that maybe they were part of William Wallace's army, or they watched Caesar ride through some street in Rome, or fought bloody battles in Prussian fields. The reality is probably turnip-themed.