Extended family

I mentioned a few posts back that cousin Pip had unearthed the birth certificate of Uncle Frank.  Pip and I are now both in correspondence with cousin Gill, who has sent us a couple of photographs of her father.  If there were any doubt that he were the son of both our grandparents, the later photograph dispels them.  He had marginally more hair than his father and brother, but the shape of his head, and the familial gap (which I inherit) between the top N°1 incisors, show an unmistakeable family resemblance.  Gill tells me he was fostered by a family who told him tales about his mother having died in childbirth, and his father accidentally in America.  I find the whole story rather moving.  In later years there would have been no fuss.  But in the grandparents' youth, she was presumably not allowed to marry and stay in teaching, and his teaching career would have been wrecked if his paternity had been acknowledged.  I'm no stranger to muttering ironically 'O tempora, o mores', but rarely in retrospect.

Anyway, the coincidences multiply: Gill's daughter, eerily named Frances, studied English at the same University of London college as my mother (Royal Holloway, with which the erstwhile Bedford merged).  I think the first vice-chancellor of the combined college was none other than my Med Hist Prof and Dean of Arts at St Andrews, Lionel Butler.  He of the occasional attack of gout, hence carpet slippers and a taxi into the quadrangle when he had to lecture.

The Kenwood bread machine is in disgrace, and I'm still wondering where the circlip from the kneading blade went.  Straight through, I hope, rather than to lodge in either appendix.  The new Panasonic contraption arrived today, and the instructions practically reverse my usual order of adding ingredients: yeast, flour, sugar, wets, salt.  Well, the first batch of dough (chouriço rolls) is rising as I type, and we'll see in due course whether the results are any different.  Ironically, I now find that one can buy replacement circlips for pence, and so we may finish up with a spare bread machine...

Some signs of spring out there: snowdrops are coming into flower, and perennials (notably the sedums) are putting up brave new growth.  The fuchsias I rescued from containers and hanging baskets are starting to shoot, so we ought to have cuttings in due course.  I'm conscious, of course, of the dismal failure of last year's New Guineas, so maintain a cautious outlook.  The charlottes arrived yesterday, and I've set them to chit in the garage.  Last time we grew them - in pots on the terrace - they were really delicious.  As soon as it's dry enough, we'll plant the crown of rhubarb that Margaret and John gave us at Christmas, complete with forcing bell.  Recipes for charlottes, rhubarb, fuchsias and sedum welcome...