My cousin, my kind of royal

I’ve always dreamed the impossible dream: that someone famous and fabulous would be related to me. If they were exotic and foreign that would be even better. From a speck in our DNA – however minute and tenuous – I would have their example to inspire me to become famous and fabulous myself.

I blame my mother. It was always her earnest wish that I’d earn a good enough living to support her in her old age, since none of the men who flitted across her screen ever seemed up to the task. Couple that with – say – a link to royalty, and she would have been ecstatic.

I was less thrilled for the obvious reason that I was not too keen on supporting anyone, even a mother, as well as myself.

In the end she died young. I dealt with her possessions, few as they were, and took delight in throwing the many publications about the royal family into the great skip where the world’s unwanted and loathed possessions go, probably forming a floating island of souvenirs of the last coronation.

I’d had it with the royals after a childhood dressed like the Queen’s children, and with my mother’s regular lament that she could easily have been the Queen and made a good job of it. They were close in age, but worlds apart in every possible way.

Iwasn’t cured of her ambition for me, though. Unwelcome memories have a way of morphing into equally unwelcome parts of your life in another guise. substituted people of fame and fabulousness for royalty, as my wishful connection beyond the state house.

It would never have occurred to me that this would be possible in the real world of Wairarapa, where generations of my family, on both sides, lived unremarkable lives. All but one, whose funeral was held yesterday, in my home town.

I wasn’t in the crowd. It’s a bit much to claim a connection at a man’s funeral whom you never knew, only shared DNA with, but I wish I had at least met Sir Brian Lochore, who sounds like the sort of man anyone would want to claim kinship with.

It seems to me that there was fame there, and decency, which is a good substitute for fabulousness. I’m impressed by what people who knew him say about him, and I certainly prefer him as a distant cousin to some possible chinless, entitled relation with a triple-hyphenated name.

Of course I’ve had my DNA sorted by one of those outfits that feed our collective desire for links to somewhere and some people of interest. As far as I know there were a lot of agricultural labourers, a sock knitter, a shoemaker, probably heaps of crofters, dour German Protestants, and a great-great grandmother who spent a lot of time in a 19th-century poorhouse with her illegitimate children.

It’s no surprise that my gene pool traces back to northern Europe. The only interesting bits are specks of Russian and Finn.

We live in Polynesia, but the mirror tells us we’re pale-skinned. We share a history of colonisation that’s no longer a happy tale of bringing civilisation to benighted natives. We may not be altogether good guys, but I doubt that such issues of identity troubled my famous cousin.

By the sound of it, he was a well-adjusted person, one of the down-to-earth, good blokes we see too few of scrambling about in the city.

I hope his won’t be the last generation to see a little of themselves in Fred Dagg, and have the decency to laugh.