Another World

I recently attended a gathering to mark the passing of a relative, and very strange I found it. It was strange not just for the conventional reasons – it’s always strange to hold a meeting for a person who isn’t there, mimicking rituals that no longer apply – but because families themselves are strange.

In many cultures, where extended families are operational, it would be surprising if a person didn’t know who everyone was. But in Britain, at least, it’s rare to find anyone who knows what a cousin twice removed is, let alone whether they’ve got any or who they are. Part of that might be because we don’t have much of a vocabulary for distant relatives, so are reduced to counting our fingers each time, and dredging our memories for family trees, with all their branches, dead ends and dotted lines.

Perhaps that’s just the price of progress. In recent decades we’ve broken with the traditions and taboos of the brief few centuries that put its faith in Family Bibles, books of scripture in which we solemnly inscribed the slowly-growing lists of births and deaths and marriages, and now venerate personal freedoms over space and time and companionship and all the ambiguities that come with them. But those Family Bibles weren’t infallible records, any more than official censuses and registers, and I doubt my family’s history is exceptional in failing to explicitly record a number of emigrations, secret marriages, divorces, undeclared partnerships, disputes, burglaries, murders, and at least three supposedly accidental deaths, despite them being, through all the centuries, bluntly, the only points of interest. Of those, no record, official or otherwise, exists except in the meandering embroidery of vague recollection.

That’s not because my relatives are indifferent. Most of them harbour some curiosity about their genealogy, and at least three have done some sort of research, gleefully drawing diagrams, collecting newspaper clippings and making lists that they insisted on sharing with the rest of us. The response was muted, possibly understandably. When we’re young, we all have trouble working out who we are, and imagine that a knowledge of where we come from, relatively speaking, might help us find out, which is presumably why geneaology web-sites, and genetic-analysis services are doing such brisk business, even though neither seems any more reliable than the partial, and sanitised snapshot of an official census which reflects only a world where bigamy doesn’t happen and everyone emerges, like a pearl from an oyster, from the shiny discretion of wedlock.

As we get older, and reality dawns, we tend to put such curiosity aside and resign ourselves to the fact that we are who we are, and no amount of research, diagrams or self-help is going to materially make any difference. Each of us is, perhaps unfortunately, unique, and can have as many different histories as we, and sometimes others, choose. I know this well, having once been pictured in a newspaper holding, despite the caption, a marrow I didn’t grow and which didn’t win a prize.

Some, in the popular imagination, are more unique than others; uncles especially, if I’ve read the rooms right. All the same, we’re mostly much the same sort of weird, as a careful study of literature, from around the world and down the millennia, suggests. The petty feuds, indifferent rivalries and property disputes that make much of the fun in the Bible and were lavishly echoed by Shakespeare, would be familiar to any couch potato surviving on a diet of daytime soap, as would the gist of any Norse saga, Chinese epic, Russian novel, African folktale, Belgian comic or grocer’s commercial.

In other words, the weirdness that sets us apart from the societies we belong to is also what makes us part of them. And that’s the paradox that can make life quite hard to deal with, as it’s not easy to draw the line between weirdness that’s acceptable and the sort that isn’t. To help with that we have laws and, to give those laws authority, religions, but neither is infallible, especially in a liberal democracy, where the indefinable, and indescribable will of the people apparently holds sway over both, finely grading sins as forgiveable or otherwise. Put a cat in a bin and you’ll spark national outrage and end up in front of a magistrate. Put a rat in a bin and no-one will complain.

Ultimately, what we have is social convention, a tapestry of taboos and expectations that emerges piecemeal from each household and only seems shocking when it’s shovelled up and written down. Each piece is slightly different, and some are less hard-wearing than others, but it’s stuff we need to live by if only to know right from wrong. For how else could see why it’s fine to drive a two-tonne mobility aid through someone else’s neighbourhood at three o’click in the morning, but seen as suspicious to travel by bus?