Dear cousins,

I have mentioned my early morning tablet habit before, and I am not talking about taking lots of medicinal tonics in the early hours. As a habitual insomniac, I interact with Google while the sun prepares to rise. After just a glance or two at any one of its web pages, I have so much to think about. I recently found a website that reminded me how close-knit this world should be.

I read one of those facts that makes perfect sense, although the details have escaped me for all the years I have been living until now.  There had to be a time when there were no humans.  We had to start somewhere.  We all know that there are many different schools of thought on the internet regarding the origin of the human species.  Some of our scholarly cousins have deduced that the first man came into being about 2 million years ago, and whether you believe that Adam and Eve kicked the human race into existence, with Noah and his ark’s world clean-up theory narrowing down our origins as told in the bible, or the crash bang of chemicals that our scientists favour, there had to be one founding father and mother who is responsible for the ultimate and ongoing production of ‘us lot’.

It is a mind-blowing concept if you think about that idea’s consequences, and inevitably, they have to lead to another aspect of the thing.  We are all cousins.  The internet tells you that anyone that you meet has to be your cousin, and the most distant cousin to you that you can interact with has to be, at the very outside, your 50th cousin (although they are not likely to be much more than once or twice removed if you know what I mean).   When you consider that, it is no wonder the world is so dysfunctional.  

As the years have passed, history has dictated that the family feud has always existed, even though perhaps today’s nuclear families are more ready to admit it. 

Let’s keep it relatively simple when just thinking about your closest family members: your parents, grandparent’s children, grandchildren, possibly the great-grands (when you get to a pensioner’s time of life) and perhaps the couple of 1st and 2nd cousins you have managed to keep in touch with, can you honestly say that there is not one of them that you have never had a problem with over the years?  I can’t, which seems to be par for the course and nothing to be ashamed of.  

When we look at our most popular family icons, the news is dotted with all their arguments and disagreements.  The section of our world family which we refer to as the Royal bit is riddled with as many chinks in their harmonious existences as the rest of us, and over the past couple of centuries, they have not been showing us that much of the serene example that we were so used to observing and following in previous decades.  

We all know that marrying and reproducing with close family members is not a good thing, and looking at it from a mathematical and scientific point of view, we have all been practising a mild version of incest since the beginning of our human existence. 

The lesson I have learned through my short internet research session on this subject can be summed up in one question…

How will we ever stop all the wars and bad feelings between the nations of this world if we can’t get our more minor family factions in order? 

So, looking at the maths from another point of view, if everyone phoned one family member they had had some disagreement with or a friend (a lesser cousin) where their last meeting left a little bad feeling, and they both attempted to put their differences aside; we would all end up with a slightly less dysfunctional world family… 

Let’s take the maths out of the equation… we need to be kinder to each other.

GH, Penge 

GH offers us the electronic evidence behind her logic…

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