"Come in", she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm" (Bob Dylan)

My grandfather (left), and my great grandfather (front).

Wie geht's?

Recently, I posted on social media the fact that the Saturday night of 26th February, 1983, in New Plymouth, was a big deal in my life, in that I met Jacky Smith at a fancy dress party. If you need the origin story again - here it is.

On my post I said, "It only changed everything". And it did. Young Asher is the latest present tense product of that late February, early eighties, meeting.

As for the past, that idea stretches back through the ages as my ancestors went about their lives and somehow, eventually, I happened along.

As Bill Bryson writes:

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.

Funny old life innit.

Love and peace - WNP