Roots and Reality.

I had some quite bad abdominal pain this afternoon and declined to broadcast the fact with commendable fortitude. I had a visitor, you see, and when one has a visitor, one has the matter of decorum to consider.

And in taking such an attitude, I’m led to suspect that I’m a bit too posh to be a proper peasant. I’m sometimes disturbed by a vague sense of inner poshness and occasionally wonder where it comes from. My best guess derives from the fact that a branch of my ancestry contains a mystery, and it is just possible that I might be the grandson of a duke, denied my birthright by a dastardly conspiracy of silence.

Not that I’m sorry. I don’t think I would have suited the peer of the realm role at all well. All that wearing of robes with bits of dead animal hanging off them and having people address me as Your Grace, not to mention having to have a well stocked gun cabinet and eat grouse every morning for breakfast. It’s really not me.

And I suppose I could always pretend to be a duke if I really wanted to. I could invent my own coat of arms and family motto. I’m sure I could find somebody who could translate Neither a Leader nor a Follower Be into Latin. That was always my motto in English anyway.

Further, I think I should add that the mysterious missing person from my ancestry was probably a factory labourer or coalminer from a northern industrial town. My lineage is, therefore, probably not only safe but also reassuringly respectable.