Roots and the Anaconda

"Annie had an anaconda,
An anaconda,
An anaconda.
Annie had an anaconda.
It slept on the mat.
In came the cat, all big and fat:
Squish! Squash!
I somehow don’t need to go on with this painful family history, do I?
We are talking about actual life in all its cruel and delightful simplicity".

Back on my bog after two weeks of other people’s highways. The traveller’s moon has mocked me at night, mentioning my awful ancestors vindictively under her breath, as if I were the one responsible for them, clearly putting the cart before the horse and the ass before the donkey. I have been to the sun-blown fields of Pembrokeshire and the fly-blown domiciles of close relatives in search of both truth and booty. I have criss-crossed, the clock says interminably, the rain spattered rock studded baronies of County Clare and viewed without overweening begrudgement those Big Houses and Impregnable Castles recently called home by my matriarchal forebears. It occurs to me that they were as pregnable in the end as that ingenuous Virgin of the House, my unfortunate Grandmother, but thank Heaven for small mercies! Without the bar sinister there would have been no Me, nor the whole ark of related progeny that in the hundred years since that matrimonial miscalculation now reaches out happy tentacles to encircle the entire globe, or at least a large and semi-civilised portion of it. (To be continued after tea).