I am carrying on

I am London, Yorkshire and Crewe

I am British, Italian, and Jew

I am Catholic, Irish and Dutch

I am this and that, I am much

I am born from survivors and skivers

I was bred from majorettes and taxi drivers

I am sugar, bread and tea

I am all these things you see

I am bleach, smoke and dirt

I am cosy words and hurt

I am rock, rap and pop

I am everything and I won’t stop!

I am velvet, coir and leather

I am lavender, hollyhock and heather

I am heavy but my heart is light

I am everything in sight

I am a library, a kitchen, a spa

I am going places, far!

I am sunshine and the rain

I am humour though inane

I am dreaming and I am real

I am carrying on until…

Lucky life

My mum was raised in a slum

My dad was a gentleman

Two different worlds they did collide

And I came from them

Two different sides of the coin

I was born and raised

Learned elocution and etiquette

And fought in the street half-crazed

I learned to talk in many tongues

Just to survive, you see

I’m adaptable in every way

Because I had to be

There are many layers to my life

Many people too

Some are good and wholesome

And others will make trouble for you

I have gypsy kin, Italian, Catholic and Jew

Irish, Greek, Dutch and more

But you don’t have a clue

I don’t say these things to seek approval or fill a need

I’m sharing my life story, my culture and my creed

I’m lady and that is true, but I’m also more than that

I can hold my own in any argument, fight or spat

I adjust to what is needed at any given time

I was bred from both pedigree and hardship

I’ve lived through luxury and grime

I’ve held my head above the water and drowned in all the muck

I can’t complain about my life, because it’s filled with luck

And yet there it is in the cold and raw

And you don’t give a fuck!

But I hope you listened and didn’t ignore

My life is genuinely filled with luck!

Introducing – Ray The Rainbow Rabbit!

My rabbit Ray the Rainbow Rabbit.

Ray was born on the 22^nd July 2018 as a Dutch grey rabbit and was adopted by me, his human mother on the 5^th October, as part solace for me losing my guinea pig called Truth and part birthday present to me.  Ray was originally named Rainbow by Henry my son, but the rabbit was so deeply embarrassed and depressed by this name that we tried many various names to console the poor chap – until one day it dawned on me that Ray could be a shortened version of Rainbow and Ray has loved us ever since! 

When we first told Ray that his name was going to be Rainbow when we got him home, he did in true rabbit style drama collapsed on his side and was sulking for the first 4 months of living with us.  When I said to him I will now permanently call him Ray near the end of March he was so happy he literally did circuits around his cage and now licks and purrs at me whenever we snuggle.  Whenever I remind Ray that he is called Rainbow, he instantly gets shy, lies down tightly with his ears pinned firmly back to his neck and refuses to acknowledge anyone. 

Ray is toilet trained and is a house rabbit that coincidentally is a huge fan of Peter Rabbit from Cbeebies – my former rabbit Rozzy liked Dr Who.

Ray doesn’t like carrots in fact all rabbits I’ve ever had hates carrots, so I don’t believe in the carrot munching rabbit myth.

Ray has been trained to say “Hello” and “Yes” by using his ears as sign language – yes I know you are probably getting your phones ready to send the men in white coats to me right now aren’t you?  But it is true and someday I will get a phone I can work out and prove it to you on YouTube!

He is a very talkative and responsive rabbit with a temper – I have never known such an aggressive self-assured rabbit before and he will bite!

But he is a loving soul really; I also think he is rather mystical; he has done many strange and unexplained things since living here.  Such as managing to push an entire corn on the cob out of the narrow prongs of his cage by himself, flattened his wooden hut and often high fives Henry.  Not to mention the household Nisse is his best friend!

Family tree research

So I unwittingly took the week off from writing, this wasn’t planned; I tend to go into fazes of genealogical research.  I have a family tree which I take great care of; especially for my father’s side of the family, nan told me as much as she could before she died and it helped me very much but she focused on her side of the family and didn’t tell me anything at all of granddad’s family.  I’ve neither idea what granddad’s mother’s name was, nor how many siblings he had other than great auntie Florence.

I’ve discovered many things about my paternal grandmother’s ancestors though, such as we can date one part of the family down to 1450 and another side is supposedly an old Roman family, who have been aristocrats for nearly two thousand years in Europe; I say supposedly because there was an Italian migrant in my family in 1480 to the UK who had the surname Senex and was an aristocrat who married a barons daughter and he had to anglicize the name to Maude when he bought some land; Senex is supposed to be an off shoot of a Roman family name Caesilius who are directly linked to Scipii and Secundus (that means there’s a possibility I am related to Pliny), though I can’t be sure and I doubt there’s going to be much information on it, though there might be records in Rome about Roman families, unsure.

This is all pure speculation because I found a website that can follow Pliny’s line to the present day, but I am skeptical because a lot of people just add any old connection to their surname without being sure if they’re true blood or not.

My paternal grandmother’s side of the family are both Italian and Dutch migrants who were aristocratic right up until 1840 when a lot of them started to migrate to Australia, America or marry beneath themselves, there was also an incident where a member of the family was heavily fined because they owned cottages and his people were found to have poached on a neighboring lords lands and was a little too sentimental about evicting them – also he gave a lot of money to the society of friends as he was apparently, very pious and found money a detriment to society, which is quite odd.

There’s information I’ve researched about my mother’s family, though some of mum’s cousins demand that my lead is wrong, because there’s a lot of tales of grandeur on that side; but I’ve bought records directly linking mum’s lineage from Kew itself when I’ve had some spare money and they’re wrong, I have proper recorded proof.  Such as my grandmother was raised in Enfield in farm cottages and her grandmother originates from Crawley as a dairy maid to a manor house, in fact all her family does and they even have the surname Crawley as they didn’t move from the area for hundreds of years.  My granddad’s family are half Jewish who converted to Catholicism for love which in those days was apparently sinful to marry outside of your religion; they owned a dressmaking boarding school and a tailor business in Soho, they were the original Jewish tailor business migrants of Victorian England, these days they have a chain of restaurants and don’t communicate with this side much and some have kept to their Jewish roots.

Mum’s cousins are very upset with my findings that great granddad was a foundling child – that’s similar but not as horrible as being a workhouse child; they insist he wasn’t a foundling, though they admit they never knew of his past as he never told anyone anything and was always evasive about it. 

Foundling children are different to work house children because they don’t remain working in the foundling hospital all the time, like workhouse children – when the children are 14 the boys are expecting to join the navy or army and live their lives as soldiers that are their fate, nothing else.  Girls tend to be trained in all domestic work so that they can be literally, sold into servitude for manor houses and wealthier people from the age of 14, though they can choose to leave as soon as they were an adult though life for them would usually be hard and terrible if they left their positions.  But all in all it was much better being a foundling child than a workhouse child.

Anyway, now you know what’s been keeping me from you, I am still involved with doing my tree, almost 2000 people in there now, but it does tend to gobble my time up as I get so involved with it all.  I want to get things right for my kids to sit back and look at where they’re from and how we’re likely to progress or digress as a family in the future, how the wheels of fortune constantly turn.