Another go at organising the Passing Down text - click to view properly

From the New Scientist

Here's an interesting study announced in the New Scientist.
Does knowing about our genes help us change our behaviour?

Poem, first draft

Passing Down

We come from Africa, from Asia, from Spain,
Ireland, France. We are descended (so we are told)
from Florence Nightingale, from Basque pirates,
from the Armada, from Slaves.

Our great grandfathers were sacked
for knocking foremen’s hats off with cheese butties.
On the night of the census in 1901
they were in Walton Gaol. They had letters sent
to let their wives know they were not dead.
They died in workhouses. They drowned in the Irish Sea.
They wore someone else’s medals in the photograph.

Our great grandmothers were duchesses
who ran away with gardeners. They climbed up lampposts
and caught their knickers on the spikes
and hid rolled up twenties in Smartie packets

Our grandfathers were overlookers. They flew planes in the war
and brought back birds on their wings. Our grandmothers
were flappers. They put Dolly Blue in the font and watched
the congregation cross themselves; they won geese in raffles
and had to drag them home on strings.

We had aunts, who lost their false teeth
and made their own from chewing gum,
or who went round the world and had children
out of wedlock. We have black sheep - one with two families
whose body found on the council tip. We have uncles
up in court for poaching (out of season).
Someone in our family’s past survived the holocaust.

Our mothers were pessimists who survived Stalin’s famine.
They were nurses and pharmacists. They were in panto
with Flannagan and Allen. They were outgoing
and free-spirited, would have been more adventurous
given a chance. They just wouldn’t button it
when they knew they should.

Our fathers could always laugh in a crisis.
They were the quiet ones, the observers.
In bad times we think about what they
might have done. They blacked up like a minstrels
and knew all the monologues, were Rhodes scholars
from Zambia. We grew up with perfect fathers
we never knew.


We are quiet like our grandmas
and our dads. We got our dads temper
with the ‘red hair gene’. We make safe choices
like our dads. They shaped our politics,
teaching us materialism was vulgar. We can sing
like our great great grandfathers. We got our mum’s
dodgy knees. We are short sighted like our dads.
We are clever like our them and good at history.
We get our logical reasoning side
from our mums. We have learned to be better
at expressing affection like our mums.

We had to learn to stand up for ourselves.
Sometimes bullying made us stronger, enabled
us to put up with more. But it damaged us too.
We don’t let our children waste their food.
We are fussy eaters because of what we were forced
to eat at school. We never learned to be happy
with what we had.

We take after women who fight for justice.
Our friends. We even start using the same words.
We have role models who we think up to. The people
we work and live with make us act the way we do. There are wider
cultural influences. Our choices are economically defined.

We take after people in our dad’s family
we never even knew of. There are people
we wouldn’t want to be related to. Our grandfathers
work in us through our mums, who never
wanted us to have the childhood they had.

We have no family other
than our immediate family. Our world
can collapse around us. We have dreamt
of the grandparents and great grandparents
that we have never met. We only ever hear
stories that are never about us.

We are ourselves. We make choices.
We have invented our own histories. Our sense
of who we are changes with where we are. Other people
see what they see. We’ve never believed
we are born to be this, or born to be that. The whole
of our lives shape us. We can’t think of a single one
of our families that we are like. We believe we are unique.

We try to make choices, but it’s difficult
to have that level of understanding. As we get older
we can consciously make a decision –
but what it is depends on our temperament.
Some of us rebel, some of us acquiesce.
We are different people once we are able to chose.

We try not to end up like our parents – but we do.
We adopt their characteristics
as our perspective on life changes.
When we find ourselves with children it’s our mother’s voice
that comes out of our mouth. Even away from them
we run on along the same lines. Phrases
are embedded in our subconscious.
We gain our values from our forebears.
If our parents let us discover ourselves, we can be someone
totally different, but more like them than we realise.

Our sons are practical like their fathers,
they look just like pictures of us
when we were young. Our daughters
have their dads ‘laid back genes’. Their mannerisms
are just like ours – mischievous monkeys.
They hold their heads like our fathers
and are volatile. They just get on with it, much like us.

We have asked questions – how can a man with blue eyes
be my father? How can green eyes
pop up after generations? We wonder
if our short legs are genetic or the result of rationing.
We worry that we will be attracted to men
like our fathers. We think that maybe the first born
always take after their dads. Could our memories
come through DNA?

Are our children tall
because of what we fed them on? How can you undo
what happens early? How much depends
on our environment? How much is something
inside of us? Where did that come from?
How much is wishful thinking?

Progress Report

All the workshops are done now, and my book is full of post-its, postcards and transcriptions. I've picked out my favourite snippets and written them onto circles and strips for Lynn, who is busy considering ways to arrange them visually. In the meantime I'm planning on writing a long ballad which brings together as many of the different testimonies as possible. Should have something to post here in a week or so!

A Eureka Moment

On Sunday I went to Liverpool to the British Association's Big Bang event at the world museum, to get more people's ideas on this project (in between tasting cheese, modeling viruses and playing with knots).

On the bus on the way to the station I suddenly recognised the parallel between the process of inheritance and the stories I've been collecting.

I'd put together a book to put the stories in. On the front I'd made a representation of the diagrams which show the possibilities for the inheritance of a single genetic characteristics. It looks something like this - http://www.biotopics.co.uk/genes/crosses/gendia.html except the circles are mirror beads and the lines are ribbons.

I'm one of life's fiddlers, so I was playing with the ribbons as I sat on the bus. I noticed that there were fixed points and linking threads. The fixed points represented the gene, the connecting thread the possible ways that gene might be inherited. In a similar way I'd made a copy of my family tree and stuck sequins on to represent the people. Again there was a fixed point - a person - or in a conventional family tree - a name. Then there were lines connecting them. I remembered my discussion with Jeanette and how she'd talked about the role of the imagination in constructing the family tree. It seems as if those threads are something fixed - but in a way they aren't. People who follow the lines pick the lines they want to follow, they take a walk through the possibilities. Even seen the other way up, until someone is born those lines only represent possibilities.

In people's stories there are fixed points and there are connections. There are facts and supposition. Someone I spoke to knew that their great grandfather was in Walton Gaol on the date of the census in 1911. They have no idea why - or even if he was there the day before, or the day after. All that is speculation.

People notice traits that pass down in families - but they guess the reason behind it. I've had quite a few conversations about tallness and the contribution of both genes and environment. And though we might guess fairly accurately that someone inherited their red hair from their dad, it's harder to say for sure whether they've inherited his temper and how and why.

So, somehow I think I will need to separate out from the masses of text I have the fixed points and the linking threads - and Lynn will have the challenge of find a way of representing that visually.

Here's the list I made on the bus - rather raggedly. Is it just Manchester buses that make you feel as if you're on a dinghy in the middle of the Atlantic?

MOSI 20-22nd August

I'll be at the Museum of Science and Industry on Liverpool Street in Manchester, from 1-3pm on the 20th, 21st, August.

You can find me in the learning space which is at the end of the finishing platform of the textile gallery.

I'm hoping to talk to as many people as possible about their family stories, about what they think gets passed down in families, and how important they think that is - and about what they think makes them who they are.

If you're around please come and join me!

On Not Being Oneself

This is a bit of a rant really.

I've often noticed that when people do something stupid, something they regret, or make a bad choice, they say "I wasn't myself" or "that's not me".

There's a range of behaviours that they associate with their idea of themselves, beyond those boundaries the things they do are seen as abberations.

But it seems to me that it's not that simple - those behaviours are precisely "them". They are the choices those people make and the way those people react to certain situations.

I'd like to say that I wasn't myself on Friday morning when my internet connection went down and I got frustrated and just a little rude with the man from Virgin media. But the truth is I am the kind of person that gets very stressed when I can't get onto the internet, and that I'm the kind of person that can take that frustration out on someone on the phone.

I'm not proud of it. I shall try and control myself better next time. But in all those many many tiny facets that make up a person there's one labelled 'nightmare customer'.

I was as much myself then as I am now, when I'm feeling all calm and benevolent and at peace with the world. Especially now I've had my rant.