Who Do You Think You Are?

Is the title of a BBC series which takes a number of celebrities and leads them on a journey through their family histories.

The new series begins soon and is being heavily promoted everywhere by the BBC including a special feature on the Jo Whiley show. As Ms Whiley is apparently one of my closet co-conspirators I can only assume tat all this is been done to provoke discussion of my family tree.

Now while I've never actually done anything as tedious as plotting my family tree allow me to save you all some time. I am one of three siblings of whom two have extensive mental health problems and one has the misfortune of being a graduate.

All three were born of a father who has a long history of working for the British State and is full of stories along the lines of "So there we were sitting in East Germany when the guy's Stasi minders turned up." and "Anyway after I broke the rail workers union I turned to Marget Thatcher and said..". Although you wouldn't know it to look at his bank balance he also happens to be the man who sent the first transatlantic fax between the UK and the USA. He is an only child and there is nothing really of interest his families past.

My mother is one of seven siblings and at the grand old age of 55 is only one of those two siblings left alive. Her father did in his early 50's of a heroin overdose. He was a highly talented doctor and at the age of 16 was brought over from the Republic of Ireland at the behest of the British State. They had decided to "reward" him because at the age of 14 he saw his own father executed in front of him.

The reason that his father was killed was that during the Irish War of Independence he, despite being an Irish Catholic, decided to side with the British Security Services and worked as a doctor for the Royal Irish Constabulary. Obviously he was recruited on the belief that by working for the RIC he would somehow be helping Catholic prisoners. The IRA clearly didn't agree with him.

So there you have it a brief explanation of why my family is so fucked up. In a nutshell it's because they've been foolish enough to believe that the British Security Services would actually do something to help them so excuse me while fail to pay attention to the news drivelling about someone being "in a specialist burn centre"

Of course the British Security Services has had all this data at it's fingertips for the last ninety years or show. They just failed to correctly join the dots because well that would require them to admit culpability in the situation.

Now as for the Nature V Nurture debate. Any bio psychologist worth their salt will know that the argument is largely invalid because environmental factors can influence a persons DNA. In fact you could go so far to say that the only reason genetic research is given as much credence as it is is because the results it produces are easily plotted on a pretty little graph which looks good when you show it to potential investors.