This hasn’t really kept me from here as the whole process has been staggeringly slow, but I want to mention it here after reading this post from Christian. My own relationship with my mother was hopelessly broken and since she died a few months ago I’ve been forced back into a world I’ve been trying to escape from since I was a kid. So far the few meetings I’ve had with ‘family’ have been brief and not altogether unpleasant.

Bizarre but not unpleasant. No one’s punched me yet.

I’m still in the process of settling the estate. It’s a chore that is about to get a little more complicated thanks to the ‘eccentricities’ of some of my kin. Last Friday I spent the day traveling a couple of hundred miles to take a box of documents from one location to another location not a stone’s throw away. Loops, I jump through them. There’s a few home-truths to take on the chin along the way and that’s fine. I’m leaving as much of this as possible in the hands of my lawyer, but I think it’s fair to say that Friday was a bit of a head fuck. But I also came away with stuff like the photo heading the previous post.

That’s my old school pal, Martin Travis, with the blonde hair. That particular photo ended up in the local newspaper. No idea why.

And then there are the monkeys:

That’s me in miniature carrying a monkey. And my dad, many years previously, seems to have taken one out on a date. Again, no idea why.

The photo atop this post is my grandfather’s baptism certificate from 1910. I have one strong memory of the man and everyone who knew him is long gone, so it’s interesting to find these little artifacts from his life. I recently found his soldier’s service book from the Second World War which I’ll get up here at some point too. But if you jump ahead from 1910 to 1926 you find he was already entering the workforce:

It’s a beautiful document. I handed about twenty other intricately handwritten documents from the same period over to my lawyer so when I get those back I’ll get them up on Flickr too. The language is great. I don’t have time to transcribe it here now, but again I’ll add it to another blog post when I find the time.

And then there are my father’s GCE certificates from 1942:

Not surprised at the results, but I never knew that I shared the same middle name as my father until now.

There may be other bits and pieces squirreled away in the house I inherited, but unlike Christian I don’t really value this stuff beyond blog-fodder. My first instruction to the lawyer was to just empty the place and sell it.

With a little luck I can now handle the whole thing remotely without setting foot there again.