Day 37. 86,322 words. No progress. Quit farting around!

Another nice, warm, relaxing day that it’s rather enjoyable to look back on as the temperature sits at about -10ºC and the darkness, while slowly lifting, remains severe outside office hours.

New Year’s Day. We went to the beach near my brother-in-law’s place, then went to visit some relatives about whom I have known for a long time but never met – my dad’s cousin and his family.

They were a great group. We sat around and had some wine and snacks and the girls played with the treasury of toys. My dad’s cousin had built a TARDIS for his grandson using instructions from the Internet and a bunch of old aviating instrumentation. It was pretty damn amazing. And the way my dad’s cousin looked exactly like my late grandfather was also cool. There’s some solid genes being passed down there.

As an unfortunate result of this genetic legacy, of course, we also had to talk quite a lot about bowel cancer and assorted issues, which have also plagued this branch of the family – indeed, my second cousin (I think; my dad’s cousin’s son) had died a short time ago due to – most likely – the same complications. They showed me a picture of him. He, too, had a strong beard game although he had missed out on the premature grey I got from my mum. I wish I could have met him.

Interestingly, there was also a picture on their fridge of one of their grandkids (I want to say Wump and Toop’s third cousin?), and he turned up later on in the afternoon to make sure all his toys were put back in their proper places and his TARDIS wasn’t wrecked. It was just amusing because he looked eerily like I did when I was a kid.

I know, none of this is particularly interesting. Of course relatives look like each other, why is this news?

Well, for a start, I’ve been reuniting and thinking more about distant family members since I took an Ancestry DNA test and started getting results from it. I’ll go into more detail later (no, Ancestry have not sold my DNA to a marketing company yet and I’m not sure what sort of profit there is in flat feet and bowel cancer anyway), but it got me thinking about it all. Plus, while my immediate family all have a few characteristics in common, my nearest circle of aunts, uncles and cousins are all pretty different. It was strange to find family with whom I had such a close physical resemblance.

Just … get your butts checked on the regular. All of you.