Tabula Rasa

There were 56 of us for a start (or, at least, 56 that regularly met up and had roast dinners on a Tuesday (roast dinners should always be had on a Tuesday because they are wasted on a Sunday because that's a weekend and that's already pretty good so Yorkshire puddings are pushing it into potential delirium)). Most people, or at least those with simple and unimaginative minds, think of families as 4 or maybe 6 people. A couple of parents; a scattering of children. They might include grandparents if they are feeling particularly brave or have had a few sherries. Our family eschewed those sorts of boring hierarchical structures. Who happened to give birth to whom was about as relevant to our family structure as a the maize yield of Mexico to a sunburnt gorilla. Alejandro won the rights to be my dad, not because of some accident of shady genetic conglomeration, but because he won them fairly off Sven in a game of Calaçaños Tereparté aboard the beautiful steam paddler La Rosa in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. (I use the term 'dad' here loosely to help translate, but it essentially means that he gets to tell me to do some chores and in exchange I get a few Lira pocket money every few weeks). That is were we were now, the Atlantic. Less so the middle part and more so the part that sludges against the seawalls of New York harbour. No one really thinks they are staring at an ocean when they peer over the edge of a dock. Oceans are vast things that exist in peoples heads, whereas all they are staring at is a bit of old greasy water, or some stream up in the mountains. We just arbitrarily say that bit over there is the Atlantic, but this bit here is the Hudson river or New York harbour, but if you asked someone to point to exactly where it stops being the Hudson River and starts being the Atlantic Ocean they just point at a map (which is just some made up drawing of what someone thinks the world looks like but it doesn't) and waffle about borders or boundaries or something some pasty government man made up when he wanted to have something which was just everyone's before. Families are somewhat the same when you think about it. Wherever you draw the boundary it's all just arbitrary. Really, if you go back far enough, or speak to enough grannies, it turns out we're all related to everyone and everything. That fly over there? Well, if you've even taken a cursory glance at the contents page of The Origin of the Species, which you probably haven't, you'd know that they're probably your second cousin a billion times removed. So given it's all arbitrary anyhow, we just thought we'd do what felt right (or was most fun). Anyway, I tried patiently explaining this to the immigration man but he must be a cretin.