History shows you just can’t escape your ancestors
Ancestry-tracing TV programmes are designed to stir ancestor envy, and they succeed. I envy people with a remote touch of the exotic or an aristocratic ancestor to make them interesting. I even envy pedigree dogs their fastidiously kept lines of descent.
A bit of Ma¯ ori would have given me an all-over suntan instead of pale skin you can see the blue veins in. But my ancestors seem to have hooked up with people from the same Scottish crags, eaten the same lumpy porridge all their lives, and migrated to New Zealand to repeat the pattern.
We have crags, but no grouse to hunt, which is good. I ate grouse once, in a flash restaurant. It was revolting. I wore tartan kilts as a kid, and hated them.
Surely I’m no Scot.
On TV ancestry programmes people discover they’re descended from kings and African slaves. My DNA test result tells me I’m all white, as I glumly predicted; Scottish, Western European, English, but, anticipating my disappointment, a touch of Finn and a trace of Russian. Reindeer and borscht. Cabbage rolls and herrings. The tucker doesn’t get any better.
History bosses us about, not the other way around.
I am no aristocrat, and neither is Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, by birth, though she practised aristocratic bed-hopping to the point where, when Prince Charles becomes king, she’ll be queen. She was expected to be called the princess consort in that event, a few rungs down the ladder, but now we’re told Charles may have changed his mind.
As a mere commoner I protest, on the grounds that she was sleeping with Charles when the unhappy girl he married was providing him with an heir and a spare, and that was cruel. There ought to be a law against marrying off naı¨ve 19-year-olds to breed in the expectation of romance. No woman should be allowed to marry before she’s 30, least of all to posh older men who think the creaky Goon Show is the height of funny and take marital infidelity – their own – as a given.
Camilla had a practical view of sexual morality, and, though she was neither a beauty nor a true aristocrat like poor old Diana, fooled around with Charles, her grandmother having done the same with his grandfather. Or something like that.
It’s in the breeding you see. Hussies in the genes.
I also object on the grounds of Camilla’s horrible hats. They’re a bad sign in a person, like wearing slippers to the dairy.
I guess I can look on Russia differently now that I can claim a fingernail’s worth of Russian, and will feel a gravitational pull toward Vladimir Putin as a heroic, rather than scary, figure. As a new Cold War looms I’ll feel torn between the chunk of DNA that harks from the Hebrides, and therefore Trump, and the fraction that’s more crafty and interesting. I usually prefer interesting, though a burst of anti-Semitism from Putin this week was offputting, especially given Russia’s history of pogroms, as was the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in London.
As for being white, it’s not something to brag about while Western Europe drifts toward racist right-wing policies, a worrying trend with desperate brown-skinned people beating at their doors. My guess is they have as much hope of blocking their path in the long term as the Romans did when their empire crumbled, and what we call barbarians – Western Europeans among them – moved in. We change, like it or not. History bosses us about, not the other way around.
In the light of that, Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, being photographed with the French National Front’s Marine Le Pen last weekend was ominous.
Did the president of the United States actually spend months of his precious life listening to Bannon tell him, as Bannon told Le Pen, ‘‘History is on our side’’? and ‘‘Let them call you racist’’? People are thrown out of dinner parties for less.
Closer to home a French bulldog known as Pickles faces his day of reckoning for savaging a Chihuahua and its owner in Christchurch. As always in such cases the owner says the aggressor is meek as a lamb, but breeding will out.
Pickles may be of pure pedigree descent, but its forbears way back were bulldogs crossed with ratters.
If Pickles were human, it would have the anarchic energy of a Bannon, crossed with the wilful unpredictability of a Trump. How fortunate we are that those two can’t procreate. At least, not with each other.