A short while ago I published this post about my search for my ancestors and ended by saying that there was another story to be told, for although the family I found had for the most part fairly humble origins, one branch of the old family tree led down a very different path.

In the year 1839 parish records show that my great-great-grandfather, who was a farmer, married a young lady who was possibly ‘above his station’, for my great-great-grandmother was descended through seven generations of the same family to a lady of noble birth who’s father was thought to be the illegitimate son of King Henry VIII (1491-1547). This lady, in her own right, was descended from the ‘Plantagenets’, so which ever way you look at it, and much to my disgust as a republican, it would seem that I have a few drops of royal blood pumping through my old veins.

Now ‘she who must be obeyed’ has always commented on the fact that I do look a bit like the “Merry Monarch”, (probably something to do with his codpiece) and now that I think about it I do see some resemblance (which is more than can be said for this bloke).

Today is my 72nd birthday, so I’m off to the pub for lunch with ‘she who must be obeyed’. I just hope that they have not run out of …

… Ye Olde civit of hare … Ye wilde boar … and .. Ye gilt sugar plums.

I’ve just been reading about a report that suggests that children’s IQs may be affected by what they eat in their formative years. The researchers who compiled this report don’t go as far as to say that burgers, pizza and chips (fries) turn you into a moron, but they do suggest that poor nutrition may affect brain development.

Hold on a minute ! … Most of my formative years were spent hiding from Hitler’s bombers with a thick slice of bread and dripping in my grubby little hand. In fact bread featured a lot in my diet, as it was one of the few foodstuffs that was not rationed during World War II. Bread pudding was a real treat.

As meat was in short supply at the time and strictly rationed, my mum would cook all sorts of pies, puddings and stews and nobody ever asked what they contained, for I suspect that, like the sausages of that time, most of the ingrediants consisted of what would have once been thrown away or fed to the pigs. Chips, eggs and sausages were always cooked with a big ‘dollop’ of fat in a frying pan. We also enjoyed slices of fried bread and fried bacon when we could get it. As I recall a lot of things went into that heavy frying pan including those delicacies from the USA … ‘Spam’ and ‘powdered egg’.

Fruit did not play a big part in my 1940’s diet, in fact I didn’t even see a banana until I was six years old, and things like oranges came from somewhere called the ‘black market’.

Today’s kids have burgers and pizzas … I had rissoles and ‘toad in the hole’ (for my American friends… This does not contain real toads), and where youngsters today tuck into a ‘Happy Meal’ I used to eat salty chips out of a newspaper, and my dessert was likely to be ‘spotted dick’, not a ‘McFlurry’.

So did all that stodgey grub affect my brain power ? … for it certainly didn’t make me fat.

Well I’m sure that some of you who have read some of my dumber posts will think it possible; but all I can say is that at the age of eighteen I was conscripted for national service and avoided two years in an itchy khaki suit and big boots by passing the IQ test for the Royal Air Force. Although I suppose if I had been really smart …

… I would have stayed in ‘civvy street’.