quick catchup

Current work: Rome Riva
Listening to: various (mainly Beethoven)
Reading: Rachel Hore, A Place of Secrets (enjoying very much, though I haven’t had time to read this week)

Today is probably going to be spent baking with daughter and her best friend. Seems to have been a very busy, sociable week this week. We also managed to fit in a cinema trip; last year, we were spoiled for choice and ended up going twice a week, but this year there hasn’t been much we’d all want to see. (I had vetoed ‘Cowboys v Aliens’ until I saw the trailer – Harrison Ford AND Daniel Craig? Well-filling time, methinks.)

‘Zookeeper’ has been out for a fortnight and its last viewing was on Tuesday, so after son’s best friend went home we nipped into the city and caught the last show. DH warned me that it had terrible reviews. OK, so the plot was utterly predictable, but there was a lot of warmth and charm in it, and it made me laugh for the right reasons. And the best bit for me (not exactly a spoiler) was the end credits, where you have certain actors singing ‘More than a Feeling’… while in character as the animals. Really appealed to my sense of the ridiculous. (I put on the original, on the way home, but both kids refused flatly to sing along as giraffes. A year ago, I could’ve talked them into it... Sigh. They're growing up.)

The family history research has just had a major ‘oh, what?’ moment. A copy of my grandparents’ wedding certificate arrived yesterday. And the name of my great-grandfather isn’t what I thought it was. Hmm. My grandmothers’ parents’ surnames are not that common, I can only dig up one marriage with those two surnames in the space of the 20 years before my her birth, and my uncle remembers her dad’s name as being what I thought it was. So something isn’t quite right. Could it be a mistake by the registrar on the wedding certificate? Was my great-grandfather known by a family name rather than his real name? Only one way to find out: so I’ve ordered her birth certificate. Let’s hope it illuminates things rather than confusing me even more!